Quotes About Advancement

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons. —POPULAR MECHANICS

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).

Computers are about one hundred million times more powerful for the same unit cost than they were a half century ago. If the automobile industry had made as much progress in the past fifty years, a car today would cost a hundredth of a cent and go faster than the speed of light. As

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.

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.