Quotes from Ray Kurzweil

The enchantment of intelligence seems to be reduced to "nothing" when we fully understand its methods. The mystery that is left is the intrigue inspired by the remaining, not as yet understood methods of intelligence.

When a machine manages to be simultaneously meaningful and surprising in the same rich way, it too compels a mentalistic interpretation. Of course, somewhere behind the scenes, there are programmers who, in principle, have a mechanical interpretation. But even for them, that interpretation loses its grip as the working program fills its memory with details too voluminous for them to grasp.

While I probably should have mentioned that you shouldn't try this in a real moving car (but then I assume you have already mastered the rule that you shouldn't drive with your eyes closed), that's not really the key problem here.

I am often reminded of Arthur C. Clarke's third law, that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

In my view there is something essentially special, after all, about human beings. We were the first species on Earth to combine a cognitive function and an effective opposable appendage (the thumb), so we were able to create technology that would extend our own horizons. No other species on Earth has accomplished this.

La futura era GNR (genética, nanotecnología, robótica) no nacerá debido solamente a la explosión exponencial de la computación, sino debido a la interacción y al gran número de sinergias que resultarán de múltiples avances tecnológicos entrelazados entre sí

Scientific advances are enabled by a technology advance that allows us to see what we have not been able to see before.

New models based on direct personalized communication with the customer will transform every industry, resulting in massive disintermediation of the middle layers that have traditionally separated the customer from the ultimate source of products and services.

Information is not knowledge. The world is awash in information; it is the role of intelligence to find and act on the salient patterns. For example, we have hundreds of megabits of information flowing through our senses every second, the bulk of which is intelligently discarded. It is only the key recognitions and insights (all forms of knowledge) that we retain. Thus intelligence selectively destroys information to create knowledge.

Ultimately our brains, combined with the technologies they have fostered, will permit us to create a synthetic neocortex that will contain well beyond a mere 300 million pattern processors. Why not a billion? Or a trillion?

we each appear to have two brains, not one, and we can do pretty well with either.

To compare the rate of progress of the biological evolution of intelligence to that of technological evolution, consider that the most advanced mammals have added about one cubic inch of brain matter every hundred thousand years, whereas we are roughly doubling the computational capacity of computers every year

Work by physiology professor Benjamin Libet at the University of California at Davis shows that neural activity to initiate an action actually occurs about a third of a second before the brain has made the decision to take the action.

Computers doubled in speed every three years at the beginning of the twentieth century, every two years in the 1950s and 1960s, and are now doubling in speed every twelve months.

Furthermore, neurons are extremely slow; electronic circuits are at least a million times faster. Once a computer achieves a human level of ability in understanding abstract concepts, recognizing patterns, and other attributes of human intelligence, it will be able to apply this ability to a knowledge base of all human-acquired—and machine-acquired—knowledge.

The state of the art in computer technology is anything but static.

The human mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with a similar energy. —W. I. BEVERIDGE

Machine intelligence will improve its own abilities in a feedback cycle that unaided human intelligence will not be able to follow.

The key idea underlying the impending Singularity is that the pace of change of our human-created technology is accelerating and its powers are expanding at an exponential pace.

It's likely [that we're] just another ten to twelve years away from the point that the general public will hit longevity escape velocity.

Stephen Hawking recently commented in the German magazine Focus that computer intelligence will surpass that of humans within a few decades. He advocated that we "urgently need to develop direct connections to the brain, so that computers can add to human intelligence, rather than be in opposition."25 Hawking can take comfort that the development program he is recommending is well under way.

It was not Boris Yeltsin standing on a tank that overturned the 1991 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, but rather the clandestine network of fax machines, photocopiers, video recorders, and personal computers that broke decades of totalitarian control of information

What, then, is the Singularity? It's a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed.

The key idea underlying the impending Singularity is that the pace of change of our human-created technology is accelerating and its powers are expanding at an exponential pace. Exponential growth is deceptive. It starts out almost imperceptibly and then explodes with unexpected fury