Motherboard

The 28-year-old filmmaker and erstwhile Current TV host Jason Silva is one of the youngest and most energized enthusiasts of our bio-engineered future. Mention “the singularity” and Jason’s face lights up. When he talks about being immortal, he’s not proving that old fogey idea that all kids think they’ll live forever. He’s exuberantly echoing the visions of his favorite scientists and philosophers.

To wit: his short documentary The Immortalists, which he made while working at Current (and which they declined to broadcast), and his next project, a little film he’s planning called “Turning Into Gods.” The concept trailer is above. All the valid concerns about human hubris and technological faith aside, it’s breathtaking stuff.

When the techno-optimist transhumanist wunderkind visited the Motherboard offices recently, I asked him how he decided to turn “Turning” into reality. He could hardly contain himself.

Jason: John Brockman [of Edge] hosted a dinner at TED last year, which he called “The New Age of Wonder,” and there was an article that described this dinner. It was titled, “When Science and Poetry Were Friends.” At the dinner, Freeman Dyson said that, “In the future, a new generation of artists will be writing genomes as fluently as Blake and Byron wrote verses.” This really beautiful, visual idea of us with the artistry that at the piano was able to produce beethoven and mozart’s music: That creativity is going to use the genome as its new instrument. what happens when you give Shakespeare the pen, what happens when you give Shakespeare the new genome codes? What kind of apps are we going to make with our genomes?

That, along with Stewart Brand’s notion that “We are as gods, and we might as well get good at it” — well, let’s get good at it! What are we going to do? What is this going to look like! As an optimist, I see it like a song, I see it like an anthem to what we’re capable of. This is kind of how I felt when I watched the Hubble 3D Imax film. It blew my mind, much better than any religious experience I ever had.

I want “Turning into Gods” to be an unfolding of mystical and metaphysical sensations, even though it’s a film that’s ultimately about scientists talking about science. But they’re applying creativity and remaining, as Alan Harrington says, uncompromising child-like voyagers, maintaining a child’s eye view of what might be, which is the only way to achieve anything. To take your brain through the looking glass and down the rabbit hole, and play some jazz. And that’s what I hope that this doc is going to be.

Stay tuned for my full interview with Jason. In the meantime, see our documentary about Ray Kurzweil and our interview with Aubrey de Grey, and sign up for the H+ Summit at Harvard in June