Johnny Depp to Play Supercomputer in a Singularity Movie with Christopher Nolan Involved

Johnny Depp will play a scientist whose brain is uploaded into a supercomputer in the highly anticipated film, “Transcendence,” the movie’s producer told TheWrap exclusively.

“Transcendence,” plot details of which have been shrouded in secrecy, comes from the team behind the time-bending thriller “Inception”: Christopher Nolan is executive producing, and his longtime cinematographer, Oscar-winner Wally Pfister, will direct “Transcendence” as his first feature. The story is by Jack Paglen.

According to a recent script summary obtained by TheWrap, the plot involves a scientist whose brain is uploaded into a supercomputer with the aim of creating the world’s first machine that can think for itself.

The film’s producer, Andrew Kosove, confirmed in an interview with TheWrap on Tuesday: “It is true Johnny Depp’s brain is uploaded into a computer.”

Kosove also confirmed that singularity, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence are important to the script.

I would note that Hollywood artificial intelligence movies have a difficult time to explore any of these ideas in a serious way. A primary example would the the Will Smith movie “I Robot”. The closest they came was the Spielberg “AI”. Two or three hours is not enough to explore new aspects of these ideas. However, Christopher Nolan did interesting explorations in “Inception.”

Exploring Singularity, nanotechnology and AI worlds would take something like an HBO series where the audience gets entertained enough to make an investment of time and energy to figure out what is going on. As much effort on the audience and creators part as “Game of Thrones” or “Fringe”.

The summary obtained by TheWrap has many details about the futuristic story. In it, three scientists — Max and the husband-and-wife team of Will and Evelyn — have been developing a programming code for the world’s first fully self-aware computer.

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