MACHINE OF HUMAN DREAMS, ISRAEL / KINGDOM OF GREAT BRITAIN, 108 MIN., 2016

Directed: Roy Cohen
Ben Goertzel, a renowend computers expert, has dedicated his life to developing a higher form of intelligence. Ben and his team have to overcome personal, professional and financial problems as they try to create the next step in evolution. A.I. guru Ben Goertzel grew up in a hippie community during the Vietnam War. Inspired by science fiction, he imagined a perfect rational world that would transcend the violence of 1970s’ America. Since then, Ben has dedicated his life to developing OpenCog, a software that models the human mind. If Ben’s design works, OpenCog will become a humanlike general intelligence. But for OpenCog to work, it needs a body. Shot over the course of 2 years, this film follows Ben’s attempts to create an OpenCog prototype in Hong Kong. But pursuing a dream of this scale is an arduous task. As difficulties pile up, people from Ben’s past cast doubt over his ability to deliver the dream.