Quotes from Ray Kurzweil

We may romanticize the past, but up until fairly recently most of humanity lived extremely fragile lives in which one all-too-common misfortune could spell disaster.

I can understand why many observers do not readily embrace the obvious implications of what I have called the law of accelerating returns (the inherent acceleration of the rate of evolution, with technological evolution as a continuation of biological evolution).

Substantial portions of our species still live in this precarious way, which is at least one reason to continue technological progress and the economic enhancement that accompanies it.

Just as we find it hard to see beyond the event horizon of a black hole, we also find it difficult to see beyond the event horizon of the historical Singularity. How can we, with our brains each limited to 10^16 to 10^19 cps, imagine what our future civilization in 2099 with its 10^60 cps will be capable of thinking and doing?

The advent of strong AI is the most important transformation this century will see. Indeed, it's comparable in importance to the advent of biology itself. It will mean that a creation of biology has finally mastered its own intelligence and discovered means to overcome its limitations. Once

This romancing of software from years or decades ago is comparable to people's idyllic view of life hundreds of years ago, when people were "unencumbered" by the frustrations of working with machines. Life was unfettered, perhaps, but it was also short, labor-intensive, poverty filled, and disease and disaster prone.

It is one of the most remarkable things that in all of the biological sciences there is no clue as to the necessity of death. If you say we want to make perpetual motion, we have discovered enough laws as we studied physics to see that it is either absolutely impossible or else the laws are wrong. But there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death.

once an AI goal is achieved, it is no longer considered as falling within the realm of AI and becomes instead just a useful general technique. AI is thus often regarded as the set of problems that have not yet been solved.

Ultimately the demonstrated ability of technologies such as GMO to solve overwhelming problems will prevail, but the temporary delays caused by irrational opposition will nonetheless result in unnecessary suffering.

Ironically it is GMO plants—many of which are designed to resist insects and other forms of blight and thereby require greatly reduced levels of chemicals, if any—that offer the best hope for reversing environmental assault from chemicals such as pesticides.

A century ago 30 percent of the U.S. workforce was employed on farms, with another 30 percent in factories. Both of these figures are now under 3 percent.2 Many of today's job categories, ranging from flight controller to Web designer, simply didn't exist a century ago.

Our intuition about the future is linear. But the reality of information technology is exponential, and that makes a profound difference. If I take 30 steps linearly, I get to 30. If I take 30 steps exponentially, I get to a billion.

The most important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become. —CHARLES DUBOIS

Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it.

The purposeful destruction of information is the essence of intelligent work.

Death is a great tragedy…a profound loss…I don't accept it…I think people are kidding themselves when they say they are comfortable with death.

Play is just another version of work

In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them. —John von Neumann

Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world. —ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

you create your brain from the input you get.

Yes, well, the subjective experience is the opposite of the objective reality

The story of evolution unfolds with increasing levels of abstraction.

as long as there is an AI shortcoming in any such area of endeavor, skeptics will point to that area as an inherent bastion of permanent human superiority over the capabilities of our own creations. This book will argue, however, that within several decades information-based technologies will encompass all human knowledge and proficiency, ultimately including the pattern-recognition powers, problem-solving skills, and emotional and moral intelligence of the human brain itself.

But the big feature of human-level intelligence is not what it does when it works but what it does when it's stuck. —MARVIN MINSKY