Quotes from Ray Kurzweil

A primary role of traditional religion is deathist rationalization—that is, rationalizing the tragedy of death as a good thing.

Dreams are real while they last; can we say more of life? —HAVELOCK ELLIS

it took ninety years to achieve the first MIPS per thousand dollars; now we add one MIPS per thousand dollars every five hours.

Even though we think we see the world so fully, what we are receiving is really just hints

Entonces ¿qué es la Singularidad? Es un tiempo venidero en el que el ritmo del cambio tecnológico será tan rápido y su repercusión tan profunda que la vida humana se verá transformada de forma irreversible. Aunque ni utópica ni distópica, esta era transformará los conceptos de los que dependemos a la hora de dar significado a nuestras vidas, ya sea en lo que se refiere a modelos de negocios o al ciclo de la vida (incluyendo la muerte).

we are constantly predicting the future and hypothesizing what we will experience. This expectation influences what we actually perceive. Predicting the future is actually the primary reason that we have a brain.

A key aspect of a probabilistic fractal is that it enables the generation of a great deal of apparent complexity, including extensive varying detail, from a relatively small amount of design information. Biology uses this same principle. Genes supply the design information, but the detail in an organism is vastly greater than the genetic design information.

As the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins puts the matter: "We are the only people who assume that we have ascended from apes. Everybody else takes it for granted that they are descended from gods." —

Moreover, the detailed arrangement of connections and synapses in a given region is a direct product of how extensively that region is used. As brain scanning has attained sufficiently high resolution to detect dendritic-spine growth and the formation of new synapses, we can see our brain grow and adapt to literally follow our thoughts. This gives new shades of meaning to Descartes' dictum "I think therefore I am.

The Law of Accelerating Returns: As order exponentially increases, time exponentially speeds up (that is, the time interval between salient events grows shorter as time passes).

we invent tools—to compensate for our shortcomings.

The other required resource for continued exponential growth of order is the "chaos" of the environment in which the evolutionary process takes place and which provides the options for further diversity.

This will be our ultimate act of creativity: to create the capability of being creative. A nonbiological neocortex will ultimately be faster and could rapidly search for the kinds of metaphors that inspired Darwin and Einstein.

Only technology, with its ability to provide orders of magnitude of improvement in capability and affordability, has the scale to confront problems such as poverty, disease, pollution, and the other overriding concerns of society today.

People often go through three stages in considering the impact of future technology: awe and wonderment at its potential to overcome age-old problems; then a sense of dread at a new set of grave dangers that accompany these novel technologies; followed finally by the realization that the only viable and responsible path is to set a careful course that can realize the benefits while managing the dangers.

The most complex capability of the human brain—what I would regard as its cutting edge—is our emotional intelligence. Sitting uneasily at the top of our brain's complex and interconnected hierarchy is our ability to perceive and respond appropriately to emotion, to interact in social situations, to have a moral sense, to get the joke, and to respond emotionally to art and music, among other high-level functions.

We have fifty billion neurons in the cerebellum that deal with skill formation, billions in the cortex that perform the transformations for perception and rational planning, but only about eighty thousand spindle cells dealing with high-level emotions.

The dream acts as a safety-valve for the over-burdened brain. —Sigmund Freud

Artificial "neural nets" are based on Hebb's model of neuronal learning.

Although the possibility of an even more virulent return of SARS remains uncertain as of the writing of this book, it appears that containment measures have been relatively successful and have prevented this tragic outbreak from becoming a true catastrophe. Part of the response involved ancient, low-tech tools such as quarantine and face masks.

Researchers were able to sequence the DNA of the SARS virus within thirty-one days of the outbreak—compared to fifteen years for HIV.

a mind is a brain that is conscious.

Tal y como dice el neurocientífico del MIT Sebastian Seung, "la identidad no depende de nuestros genes, sino de las conexiones entre nuestras células cerebrales" (

Each neuron acts in an essentially unpredictable fashion. When an entire network of neurons receives input (from the outside world or from other networks of neurons), the signaling among them appears at first to be frenzied and random. Over time, typically a fraction of a second or so, the chaotic interplay of the neurons dies down and a stable pattern of firing emerges.