Every year the line between Film and Interactive content blurs further, as is readily illustrated in Avi Zev Weider’s Documentary Feature Competition film Welcome to the Machine.
Weider uses the personal touchstone of his wife’s IVF treatments and their triplets’ premature births as the jumping-off point for a wide-ranging examination into how technology is impacting human development and the moral quandaries that come lockstep with modernization. In an always interesting, if at times overwhelming inquiry, the film’s net catches all kinds of big fish: the Army’s Sim Center for UAV training, the Unabomber and one of his victims, computer scientist David Gelernter, the industrial revolution, second sight, and Enigma cracker Alan Turing, a computer science trailblazer who came to a tragic end.
Interactive attendees will recognize among the many talking heads sxswi alumni, including Jaron Lanier, Kevin Kelly, Erik Davis, and one of this year’s Keynote speakers, inventor, futurist, and forward thinker Ray Kurzweil. In fact, Kurzweil’s the first talking head to hit the screen, trumpeting technological evolution over biological and laying out his prediction/prophecy that computers will be as powerful as human intelligence by 2029. Whether that sends a chill or a thrill down the spine, there’s plenty to chew on here.
Welcome to the Machine screens Monday, March 12, 9:45pm, Alamo Lamar and again on Wednesday. Ray Kurzweil’s Keynote Conversation with Lev Grossman, “Expanding Our Intelligence Without Limit,” takes place Monday, March 12, 2pm, ACC, Exhibit Hall 5. If you can’t hoof it to the Convention Center in time, the conversation will be simulcast to select rooms in all the Interactive campuses.
This article appears in March 9 • 2012.
