Quotes About Technology

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.