Will Caster Or The Modern Prometheus

On the film Trascendence (Wally Pfister, USA, 2014)

By Nicolás Quintero

Human beings constantly dream of finding ways to reach higher cognitive states in order to elevate themselves and access knowledge that may allow them to transcend and escape death itself.

In this sense, it is possible that the film sequence that best defines this experience is also the most enigmatic one in the history of cinema. This is the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The journey to the stargate is configured with images of deep space that are as powerful and meaningful as they are indecipherably beautiful, which only the viewer can make sense of. Faced with Stanley Kubrick’s ambivalence, writer Arthur C. Clarke, in the literary adaptation, explained the Monolith by introducing a superior race of extraterrestrial shepherds who pick up Bowman and imprison him in a space-time prison.

The creator of 2001’s pioneering special effects, Douglas Trumbull, directed Brainstorm (1983) a revolutionary film which played with the possibility of accessing the human mind by means of electronic devices and reproducing sensations that ultimately were the key to having transcendental near-death experiences imbued with an almost religious aura. With the passing of time and technological development available today, it is worth asking whether it would be possible to store a backup of someone’s personal experiences in order to encapsulate their personality.

This is where Transcendence (2014), directed by Wally Pfister, director of photography for Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy (2005-2012) (executive producer of this film), comes into play, maintaining the cool colours and minimalist aesthetic.

The hero, played by Johnny Depp, is a digital-age guru who works with Artificial Intelligence combined with cognitive development to create a quantum supercomputer which, connected to the cloud, is able to have emotions, this is, to decode the true meaning of an intelligent conscience and perhaps, of the human soul, through mathematics.

Although he, rather than changing the world, seeks to be able to understand it, his wife and his best friend seek treatments for diseases such as cancer as well as to end poverty and, in short, to cure the planet.

Based on the presence of a terrorist organisation opposed to technological development, the film speculates on the possibility of cloning the hero’s

consciousness, understood through biochemistry as electrical impulses able to reproduce memories and thoughts.

In short, the film narrates the evolution of a computer programme that, using solar energy and quantum computers, develops and ends up spreading across the planet with humanistic intentions, like a messianic figure. And just as in 2001 with HAL 9000, the possible alter ego of Kubrick’s rationalist intellect, once again human beings are forced to isolate themselves in the presence of a supercomputer.

Maybe mathematics genius Gödel, who proved that in a formal system there are unprovable propositions, would be interested in seeing an intelligence that, when asked by a human how to explain consciousness, does not hesitate to respond by asking the human how they can prove their own consciousness.

Therefore, when considering Turing tests and the question of knowing when a machine is self-conscious or simulating autonomous thinking, this exceptional film argues that any artificial intelligence that attempts to understand and emulate the codes of human consciousness ends up capturing the defining character of its existence.