
Singularity or Bust
Ben Goertzel and Hugo DeGaris are AI researchers who agree on almost nothing except that the Technological Singularity is coming. Filmmaker Raj Dye, a former AI programmer, spent a summer in 2009 following both men through Hong Kong and Xiamen as they build and pitch machine intelligence in China's fast-growing robotics scene. The camera catches Goertzel's optimism against DeGaris's darker forecast that super-intelligent machines could eventually wipe humanity out, a disagreement that plays out in labs, conference halls, and casual conversation rather than staged debate. One recurring subject is a three-foot-tall humanoid robot, treated by its handlers with a seriousness that borders on philosophical. A quieter thread follows a real romance unfolding alongside the research trip, giving the film a personal counterweight to the theorizing about transhuman futures. Shot handheld and edited into what its makers call a Singularitarian road movie, it stays a document of one specific year in AI research rather than a forecast, its two subjects left disagreeing about what comes next.