Quotes from Ray Kurzweil

One cubic inch of nanotube circuitry, once fully developed, would be up to one hundred million times more powerful than the human brain.9

We are a pattern that changes slowly but has stability and continuity, even though the stuff constituting the pattern changes quickly.

Increasing complexity" on its own is not, however, the ultimate goal or end-product of these evolutionary processes. Evolution results in better answers, not necessarily more complicated ones. Sometimes a superior solution is a simpler one.

The essential thing is to recognize that consciousness is a biological process like digestion, lactation, photosynthesis, or mitosis";

Our sole responsibility is to produce something smarter than we are; any problems beyond that are not ours to solve …

By the end of this decade, computers will disappear as distinct physical objects, with displays built in our eyeglasses, and electronics woven in our clothing, providing full-immersion visual virtual reality.

Electronic circuits are millions of times faster than our biological circuits. At first we will have to devote all of this speed increase to compensating for the relative lack of parallelism in our computers, but ultimately the digital neocortex will be much faster than the biological variety and will only continue to increase in speed.

Intelligence is that faculty of mind by which order is perceived in a situation previously considered disordered." —R. W. Young

Most major universities now provide extensive courses online, many of which are free. MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative has been a leader in this effort. MIT

In order for a digital neocortex to learn a new skill, it will still require many iterations of education, just as a biological neocortex does, but once a single digital neocortex somewhere and at some time learns something, it can share that knowledge with every other digital neocortex without delay. We can each have our own private neocortex extenders in the cloud, just as we have our own private stores of personal data today.

Our everyday "commonsense" knowledge as a human being is even greater; "street smarts" actually require substantially more of our neocortex than "book smarts." Including this brings our estimate to well over 100 million patterns, taking into account the redundancy factor of about 100.

There are no inherent barriers to our being able to reverse engineer the operating principles of human intelligence and replicate these capabilities in the more powerful computational substrates that will become available in the decades ahead. The human brain is a complex hierarchy of complex systems, but it does not represent a level of complexity beyond what we are already capable of handling.

By failing to engage it in intellectually challenging activities, your brain will fail to grow new connections, and it will indeed become disorganized and ultimately dysfunctional. The converse is also true for both body and brain. If someone who has not been physically active for a sustained period starts a program of physical therapy and regular exercise, she can regain her muscle mass and tone within a matter of months. The same thing is true of your brain.

The evolution of animal behavior does constitute a learning process, but it is learning by the species, not by the individual, and the fruits of this learning process are encoded in DNA.

A lot of movies about artificial intelligence envision that AI's will be very intelligent but missing some key emotional qualities of humans and therefore turn out to be very dangerous.

Nature, and the natural human condition, generates tremendous suffering. We have the means to overcome that, and we should deploy it.

Does God exist? Well, I would say, 'not yet'.

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.

Our technology, our machines, is part of our humanity. We created them to extend ourselves, and that is what is unique about human beings.

Intuition is linear; our imaginations are weak. Even the brightest of us only extrapolate from what we know now; for the most part, we're afraid to really stretch.

I'm working on artificial intelligence. Actually, natural language understanding, which is to get computers to understand the meaning of documents.

By 2029, computers will have emotional intelligence and be convincing as people.

Mobile phones are misnamed. They should be called gateways to human knowledge.

By the 2030s, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will predominate.