Quotes About Progress

It's not going to do any good to land on Mars if we're stupid.

Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You've got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it.

Science is a wonderful discipline, to which we are deeply indebted.

There is slow growth, but it is positive slow growth. At the same time, ratios of debt-to-incomes go down. That's a beautiful deleveraging.

We do need knowledge. And perhaps in a thousand years we might pick smaller cliffs to jump off. The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.

We have too many cellphones. We've got too many Internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.

We must move into the universe. Mankind must save itself. We must escape the danger of war and politics. We must become astronauts and go out into the universe and discover the God in ourselves.

GI moves past Mbye but he doesn't go too far.

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?

I believe that if you think small, you'll stay small. Getting

There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures. —Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

we were accused of having torn down a Greek Revival "landmark" building in Cambridge, Massachusetts, so we could build a McDonald's on the site. The writers failed to mention that the building was a wreck. It had been vandalized and burned before we bought it. The city of Cambridge had refused to designate it as a landmark building.

It is impossible to grant someone happiness. The best you can do, as the Declaration of Independence put it, is to give him the freedom to pursue happiness. Happiness is not a tangible thing, it's byproduct of achievement.

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

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.

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.

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?

It needs only to be good enough, which in the case of our species meant a level of intelligence sufficient to enable us to outwit the competitors in our ecological niche