Quotes About Technology

By 2010 computers will disappear. They'll be so small, they'll be embedded in our clothing, in our environment. Images will be written directly to our retina, providing full-immersion virtual reality, augmented real reality. We'll be interacting with virtual personalities.

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

Supercomputers will achieve one human brain capacity by 2010, and personal computers will do so by about 2020.

A thousand-bit quantum computer would vastly outperform any conceivable DNA computer, or for that matter any conceivable nonquantum computer.

We come from goldfish, essentially, but that [doesn't] mean we turned around and killed all the goldfish. Maybe [the AIs] will feed us once a week…. If you had a machine with a 10 to the 18th power IQ over humans, wouldn't you want it to govern, or at least control your economy? —SETH SHOSTAK

I set the date for the Singularity—representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability—as 2045. The nonbiological intelligence created in that year will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today.

Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever

Contemporary philosopher Max More describes the goal of humanity as a transcendence to be "achieved through science and technology steered by human values.

Although the Singularity has many faces, its most important implication is this: our technology will match and then vastly exceed the refinement and suppleness of what we regard as the best of human traits.

The first idea is that human progress is exponential (that is, it expands by repeatedly multiplying by a constant) rather than linear (that is, expanding by repeatedly adding a constant). Linear versus exponential: Linear growth is steady; exponential growth becomes explosive.

Our human intelligence is based on computational processes that we are learning to understand. We will ultimately multiply our intellectual powers by applying and extending the methods of human intelligence using the vastly greater capacity of nonbiological computation. So to consider the ultimate limits of computation is really to ask: what is the destiny of our civilization?

Ultimately, we will be able to port our mental processes to a more suitable computational substrate. Then our minds won't have to stay so small.

We are being propelled into this new century with no plan, no control, no brakes…. The only realistic alternative I see is relinquishment: to limit development of the technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge. —BILL JOY, "WHY THE FUTURE DOESN'T NEED US

The need to congregate workers in offices will gradually diminish.

Given that self-improving strong AI cannot be recalled, Yudkowsky points out that we need to "get it right the first time," and that its initial design must have "zero nonrecoverable errors."45

Ever since we picked up a stick to reach a higher branch, we have used our tools to extend our reach, both physically and mentally.

The Singularity involves an event that will take place in the material world, the inevitable next step in the evolutionary process that started with biological evolution and has extended through human-directed technological evolution.

To express this another way, we won't experience one hundred years of technological advance in the twenty-first century; we will witness on the order of twenty thousand years of progress (again, when measured by today's rate of progress), or about one thousand times greater than what was achieved in the twentieth century.4

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.

capacity, and bandwidth) of information technologies

To appreciate its apparent complication, it is useful to zoom in on its image (which you can access via the links in this endnote).

GEORGE 2048: We like to think of it as one civilization.

No communication technology has ever disappeared, but instead becomes increasingly less important as the technological horizon widens.

Machines can pool their resources, intelligence, and memories. Two machines—or one million machines—can join together to become one and then become separate again. Multiple machines can do both at the same time: become one and separate simultaneously. Humans call this falling in love, but our biological ability to do this is fleeting and unreliable.