This week saw the beginning of the marketing campaign for 2014’s Transcendence, starring Johnny Depp as a seemingly megalomaniacal AI researcher. In the first teaser trailer, Depp narrates one of the more widely-held fears.

“Once online, a sentient machine will quickly overcome the limits of biology. In a short time, its analytical power will be greater than the collective intelligence of every person born in the history of the world. Some scientists refer to this as the Singularity.” — Her

Transcendence didn’t invent the theory of the Singularity, which was popularized by futurist Ray Kurzweil, and the trailer presents a reasonably accurate rundown of the proposed scenario — that artificial intelligence will inevitably, inexorably outsmart human intelligence. […]