This is Part 2 of a two-part interview with Barney Pell, a pioneer of general game-playing programs in artificial intelligence (AI), founder of the Powerset AI-based search engine, and once an autonomous robotics researcher and manager at NASA.

Pell joined interviewer Scott Adelson for a screening of “Transcendence,” directed by Wally Pfister and starring Johnny Depp. The sci-fi movie pivots off the latest AI technology to offer a fictional depiction of what the future may hold. Here is Part 1 of their Q&A.

Warning: Some spoilers ahead! While you read the interview, listen to Mychael Danna’s music from the “Transcendence” soundtrack here:

Scott Adelson: The film’s creators consulted two scientists from Berkeley. We know that this is a piece of fiction meant for entertainment, but what realities do you think the filmmakers did a good job of conveying?

Barney Pell: I think the filmmakers did a great job at conveying what an AI would do as soon as it gained consciousness. First, connect to the Internet. Then, get money, build a safe data center, secure your energy and protect your perimeter. Then, set up a lab to do more research, and create physical surrogates so you can move around in the world as a human. I also think they conveyed biological tech improvements well. And I liked how they had the AI monitoring his wife along a large number of emotional and physical markers.

What do you think the film was about?

Ultimately, I think the film was about love and marriage. The film depicts a wonderful relationship between the two scientists as work and life partners. The scientist’s wife uploads him so that they can continue to be together. He then carries out her dream to change the world (which the film notes were not his own motivations). Any marriage is strained as the partners grow differently, and this is all the harder when one partner is evolving exponentially. Ultimately trust is tested, sacrifices are made for the relationship, and once resolved the relationship can transcend the past.

In this regard, I found the film to fall short, just as science fiction often has. In the ’50s, sci-fi envisioned a future with all kinds of amazing technologies, including intelligent robots, life on other planets and flying cars. However, they still imagined that women would be housewives, who benefit from this AI because now they can have robot maids and 3-D printers to make it easier for them to prepare dinner and lunch for the kids. In “Transcendence,” we have a brilliant and equal partnership between the scientist husband and wife, prior to the upload event. Then the husband becomes increasingly intelligent. He does many things to change the outside world and increase physical security. But he doesn’t seem to do anything to help his wife become more intelligent or powerful. Instead, we see her walking around looking at demos and having candlelit dinners with her husband projected on screens around the room.

I believe that Intelligence Amplification (IA) is as or more likely than AI to transform the world. We already benefit from a vast array of cognitive prosthetics, or “power tools for the mind.” A super-intelligent husband would pay as much attention to leveling up his wife as he does to helping the rest of the world. Even the obvious option of uploading her doesn’t seem to occur to either of them until the end of the movie, when the relationship is already damaged.

More generally, while researching all kinds of tech innovations, there should be plenty of time for both of them to research innovations in emotion and communication and partnership. I don’t think they even tried.

In the movie, they touched on how human evolution might lead to the marriage of our flesh with technology. The undercurrent of the movie was that this new form of us would be inferior to being human, and that some people will be extremely afraid of that change. Should they be? Do you think they would be? What does that future look like?

I think we are already “cyborg” and married to our technology. We each carry more computing power in our pockets now than was available to all of humanity 30 years ago. We outsourced memory of phone numbers and such items long ago. We go to the Web for information whenever and wherever we need it. And we wear glasses to improve our vision, and use microscopes and telescopes to see things smaller and more distant than our bodies were built to see. I think it’s not much of a stretch to see technology evolving to give us better peripherals (seeing, hearing, touch, smell, taste), better memories, faster access to internal computations and faster connections to other minds.

I think people are afraid of change because it always comes with unknown and often unintended consequences — and some of those will be bad. There is a real, existential risk that post-Singularity AI could take over the world. Once the genie is out of the bottle, there might be no way to put it back. On this topic, I would say while that is possible, I think it’s unlikely. In my opinion, the more intelligent people are, the less they need to resort to violence, the more they perceive abundance and possibility instead of scarcity, and the more they are motivated by actualization and helping others. I think super-intelligent AI is likely to take that path.

What did you think of the computer technology they used (data centers, quantum computing, the use of Unix, etc.)?

The movie depicted quantum computing as being the new form of computing in data centers. I’m excited about the potential of quantum computing to solve computationally hard problems of the kind we often find in building AI systems. It’s the early days, and I’m not sure what we see today is doing anything particularly special, but the research line has promise.

The idea from the film of a virus infecting every system in the world and shutting down everything connected to the Internet seemed preposterous to me. I laughed when I saw this in “Independence Day” (a virus that works across both human and alien computing environments, even!), and I laughed again when I saw it in this film.

It was fun to see Unix being used in the movie. I think that’s more likely to serve AI system builders than other OSes we have today. I think if we had a resurgence in use of LISP and Prolog programming languages, AI would come even faster.

What did you think of the government’s response in the film?

I was really annoyed by the government’s response. First off, once the word gets out that there is a true AI among us, why would you send only a small tactical unit to deal with it? Second, they really jumped to a conclusion about the AI being a threat. Given the positive changes it was already provably making for the world, they should have jumped to learn and harvest as much as possible for a world that needs help. Third, who gets to make a call to: (a) kill the only AI system in the world and (b) inject a virus to take down all computers and electronic devices in the world? A U.S. government couldn’t responsibly do (a); and (b) is not only stupid and likely to cause more damage than any AI, but also not the choice of any single government, as it affects the whole world.

Finally, the government partnering with terrorists was completely silly. And the reason to partner, because we’ll likely screw up and then we can blame the terrorists, was not just silly but also circular: If you don’t think it’s going to work, then you shouldn’t do it, with or without the terrorists to blame.

Finally, what issues do you wish the movie covered in more detail?

I wish they had covered more detail about the AI technology. I know it’s hard, but I just didn’t find it satisfying at all — but then, the AI technology itself wasn’t the story, as we discussed earlier. I would have also liked to see more detail about the “hive mind.” How did these people experience life, and what could they now do together that they couldn’t do alone? And I would have loved to see some real innovation in marriage — what would a truly superhuman intelligent husband do?

Barney Pell, PhD, is co-founder, chairman and chief strategy officer of LocoMobi, a startup deploying exponential technologies to reinvent parking and transportation. He is also co-founder, vice chairman and chief strategy officer at Moon Express, a startup building autonomous robotic lunar landers, and an associate founder and trustee of Singularity University. He was previously founder and CEO of Powerset, a natural-language search engine that was acquired by Microsoft, where he was search strategist and leader of local and mobile search for Bing. Earlier, he was a researcher and manager in autonomous robotics at NASA, where he worked on the Mars Exploration Rovers mission and the development of the Remote Agent, the first AI system to fly onboard and control a deep space probe. Reach him @barneyp.

Scott Adelson is the executive director of Signal Media Project, a nonprofit organization that promotes and facilitates the accurate portrayal of science, technology and history in popular media.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

While it can be a blast going to see the latest Hollywood sci-fi thriller, watching it along with a leading expert in the science and technology fields relevant to the dystopian color and light in front of you can make it that much better.

Such was the case at a recent screening of “Transcendence,” — director Wally Pfister’s sci-fi epic starring Johnny Depp — when I was joined for a screening by Barney Pell, a pioneer of general game-playing programs in artificial intelligence (AI), founder of the Powerset AI-based search engine, and once an autonomous robotics researcher and manager at NASA.

The movie pivots off the latest AI technology to offer a fictional depiction of what the future may hold. Needless to say, I had some questions for Barney:

Warning: Some spoilers ahead! While you read the interview, listen to Mychael Danna’s music from the “Transcendence” soundtrack here:

Scott Adelson: What is “the Singularity,” and what is the history behind it?

Barney Pell: The Technological Singularity, or the Singularity for short, refers to a hypothetical “singular” moment in time when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence. Because computers are networked and computing resources increase exponentially, shortly after that moment, computers would thereafter exceed human intelligence exponentially, and the world would be changed forever.

According to Wikipedia, the first use of the term “singularity” in this context was by mathematician John von Neumann. In 1958, regarding a summary of a conversation with von Neumann, Stanislaw Ulam described “ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.” The term was popularized by science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge, who argues that artificial intelligence, human biological enhancement, or brain-computer interfaces could be possible causes of the singularity. Futurist Ray Kurzweil cited von Neumann’s use of the term in a foreword to von Neumann’s classic “The Computer and the Brain.” Kurzweil’s recent book, “The Singularity Is Near,” goes into this in depth, and describes the exponential technologies that make this possibility likely to happen sooner than one might think.

Is “Transcendence” the first mainstream movie that talks about the Singularity? What did you think about its depiction of it?

While there have been many science fiction movies that depict AIs that are smarter than humans, this is the first mainstream movie that talks about the Singularity explicitly. (Recent films about Ray Kurzweil are not mainstream movies in the big box-office sense).

I was excited to see how this idea was captured in a mainstream movie. Overall, I enjoyed it as a story. However, from the AI perspective, the movie largely sidestepped the question of how such an AI would come to be. Essentially, the lead character is a scientist whose intelligence and personality gets “uploaded” into a computer. This seems to be achieved by having a small number of diodes on his skull, and having him read the dictionary while the system records some measure of his brain patterns. Because of the upload process, there remains an understandable question throughout the movie as to the relationship between the deceased scientist and the “uploaded” AI. In some sense, it’s perfectly reasonable, because the process would suggest that it’s at best only an approximation of the original personality. In another sense, the question becomes meaningless, because any human-level personality changes and evolves over time, and a post-Singularity AI would evolve exponentially rapidly. So the question is analogous to whether the 90-year-old man is the “same” person as the 6-year-old boy who preceded him in time.

I know you are involved with Singularity University. Can you tell us a bit about that?

What I found perhaps most interesting about the movie was that it addressed far more than the AI Singularity. If you read “The Singularity Is Near,” while it talks about the Singularity, it really talks about a whole suite of technologies that are advancing exponentially, including AI and robotics, computers and networks, biotech, nanotech, 3-D printing, and even energy and environmental systems. These “exponential technologies” became the foundation of Singularity University, of which I’m an associate founder. We teach current and future leaders about these technologies, what they mean about thinking about the future, and how they will disrupt existing industries and create opportunities for new ones.

The movie covers many of these technologies beyond AI. For example, the scientist creates advanced quantum computers, nanotech for medicine and prosthetics, nanotech for 3-D printing of any structures, brain-machine interfaces with networked minds, environmental technologies to counter global warming, and sensing systems for health care and emotion detection.

What technology in the movie do you think is possible? How far off are we from it?

For the core AI technology in the movie, which is basically intelligence vastly superior to humans, I believe it is definitely possible that we will have such intelligences. However, the technology approach in the movie, in the form of “uploading” a personality based on scanning a living brain, is more of a concept than a specific technology. The technology discussion would have to address two things: First, what is the computational architecture that can support a superhuman intelligence? And second, assuming we had such an architecture, how would we instantiate the architecture with a specific person’s personality? I don’t see anything close to such architecture in the scientific community today, much less an uploading approach compatible with an architecture.

I do believe we will have superhuman AI within 100 years, and I have spoken about my thoughts for how this will happen at the first Singularity Summit, on “Pathways to Advanced General Intelligence.” Ray Kurzweil predicts this will happen around 2037. I wouldn’t bet against this, but I just don’t see anything close to this in the scientific community at this point.

Turning to the other technologies in the movie: I think a wonderful thing about science fiction is that most technologies that can be imagined are likely to become real in the future in one form or another, unless they violate physical laws. Even then, as today’s laws reflect only our current understanding — and scientific knowledge evolves rapidly. For example, I believe we will have brain-machine interfaces that will let people interact with each other as if they had “hangouts” in their mind. I’d place that within 20 to 30 years. I think we’ll have increasingly high-fidelity and even-better-than-human prosthetics and high-quality tissue engineering within 10 years.

What, if anything, in the movie do you think is not possible?

3-D printing is advancing rapidly, and will change many aspects of life as we know it, even over the next decade. However, I’m not sure about the self-organizing smart particles as depicted in the movie — that seems to require internal energy and propulsion sources that I’m not sure will exist even in the next 50 years, and could quite possibly violate laws of physics.

If I were able to upload myself as an AI, would that really be me, or just a copy of myself?

This is really a philosophical question. As an analogy, if you have a boat and you replace one plank at a time, is it still the same boat even when all the planks have been replaced? We think people are the “same” person even after sleep, anesthesia, coma, or even “near-death” experiences. So we are comfortable with the notion that there can be breaks in psychological continuity.

But our intuitions are generally based around a person being a single entity that continues or not, as a single entity. Our intuitions don’t cope well with the concept of “copying.” If I copy your saved state of a videogame, and then we both start playing from that same saved state, we would agree that we started playing the same game, but then rapidly we are playing different games. Analogously, “you” are playing a different “you” game every second, you just don’t notice it. When there are multiple “copies of you,” it becomes impossible to say which was the original and valid one. The one occupying the original body (if any) has the best claim. So I’d say if you truly uploaded yourself as an AI, with the same fidelity as you had originally, it would validly be you. Our challenge is that we just don’t believe in the fidelity of the upload, which is a major source of concern in the movie. But if we did believe it, I think we should accept that each copy is you — or rather, was you, before it started evolving.

Did you think the movie was pro- or anti-technology?

I think the movie was pro-technology. The technologies portrayed were, in general, world-improving, and made people’s lives better of their own choice. In the movie, word spreads and people line up from all around to reap the benefits. We don’t see anyone who benefitted from the surgery, for example, regretting his or her decisions. Rather, the whole community is happier and healthier. But there are indeed anti-technology factions in the movie, which creates the drama. However, their reasons for being anti-technology are not truly validated — they are really Luddites who act out of fear of things they don’t understand, and never give the innovations a chance.

This is Part 1 of a two-part interview. Part 2 will continue tomorrow.

Barney Pell, PhD, is co-founder, chairman and chief strategy officer of LocoMobi, a startup deploying exponential technologies to reinvent parking and transportation. He is also co-founder, vice chairman and chief strategy officer at Moon Express, a startup building autonomous robotic lunar landers, and an associate founder and trustee of Singularity University. He was previously founder and CEO of Powerset, a natural-language search engine that was acquired by Microsoft, where he was search strategist and leader of local and mobile search for Bing. Earlier, he was a researcher and manager in autonomous robotics at NASA, where he worked on the Mars Exploration Rovers mission and the development of the Remote Agent, the first AI system to fly onboard and control a deep space probe. Reach him @barneyp.

Scott Adelson is the executive director of Signal Media Project, a nonprofit organization that promotes and facilitates the accurate portrayal of science, technology and history in popular media.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.