Quotes About Change

The God-fearing, churchgoing farmers are all gone. Now they all have TVs on their roofs and orgies in their barns. The flux, Fly, man, the flux of time. If everything goes tits up, there's always the farm and the cows...

But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last.

Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn't exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last.

Goodbye don't mean gone.

This society in which we live is radically changing. What previous generations saw as evil is now embraced as being good. It is a dangerous and slippery slope upon which we stand when we reject what Solomon called the beginning of wisdom - the fear of God.

Republicans are one health crisis away from being Democrats?

When you're green you're growing, and when you're ripe you start to rot.

Are you green and growing or ripe and rotting?

As long as you're green you're growing, as soon as you're ripe you start to rot

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.

If these biochemical phenomena sound similar to those of the fight-or-flight syndrome, they are, except that here we are running toward something or someone; indeed, a cynic might say toward rather than away from danger. The changes are also fully consistent with those of the early phases of addictive behavior. The Roxy Music song "Love Is the Drug" is quite accurate in describing this state (albeit the subject of the song is looking to score his next fix of love).

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

The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out.

our primate ancestors was the development of a larger cerebral cortex as well as the development of increased volume of gray-matter tissue in certain regions of the brain.32 This change occurred, however, on the very slow timescale of biological evolution and still involves an inherent

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

Two billion years ago, our ancestors were microbes; a half-billion years ago, fish; a hundred million years ago, something like mice; ten million years ago, arboreal apes; and a million years ago, proto-humans puzzling out the taming of fire. Our evolutionary lineage is marked by mastery of change. In our time, the pace is quickening. —CARL SAGAN

Von Neumann makes two important observations here: acceleration and singularity. 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).

it took ninety years to achieve the first MIPS per thousand dollars; now we add one MIPS per thousand dollars every five hours.

Entonces ¿qué es la Singularidad? Es un tiempo venidero en el que el ritmo del cambio tecnológico será tan rápido y su repercusión tan profunda que la vida humana se verá transformada de forma irreversible. Aunque ni utópica ni distópica, esta era transformará los conceptos de los que dependemos a la hora de dar significado a nuestras vidas, ya sea en lo que se refiere a modelos de negocios o al ciclo de la vida (incluyendo la muerte).

The Law of Accelerating Returns: As order exponentially increases, time exponentially speeds up (that is, the time interval between salient events grows shorter as time passes).

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.

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

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.