Quotes About Progress

Ray Kurzweil La Singularidad está cerca Cuando los humanos transcendamos la biología

Así fue como desarrollé una teoría a la que llamo ley de los rendimientos acelerados, que explica por qué la tecnología y los procesos evolutivos en general progresan de forma exponencial.

cualquier tecnología suficientemente avanzada es indistinguible de la magia".

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

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).

we invent tools—to compensate for our shortcomings.

This will be our ultimate act of creativity: to create the capability of being creative. A nonbiological neocortex will ultimately be faster and could rapidly search for the kinds of metaphors that inspired Darwin and Einstein.

People often go through three stages in considering the impact of future technology: awe and wonderment at its potential to overcome age-old problems; then a sense of dread at a new set of grave dangers that accompany these novel technologies; followed finally by the realization that the only viable and responsible path is to set a careful course that can realize the benefits while managing the dangers.

Researchers were able to sequence the DNA of the SARS virus within thirty-one days of the outbreak—compared to fifteen years for HIV.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.