Raymond Kurzweil Quotes

The power of ideas to transform the world is itself accelerating.

Consciousness becomes a matter of philosophical debate; it's not scientifically reliable.

As intelligence saturates the matter and energy available to it, it turns dumb matter into smart matter.

Until such time that computers at least match human intelligence in every dimension, it will always remain possible for skeptics to say the glass is half empty. Every new achievement of AI can be dismissed by pointing out other goals that have not yet been accomplished. Indeed, this is the frustration of the AI practitioner: once an AI goal is achieved, it is no longer considered as falling within the realm of AI and become instead just a useful general technique. AI is thus often regarded as the set of problems that have not yet been solved.

We use one stage of technology to create the next stage, which is why technology accelerates, why it grows in power.

There have been attempts to respond to the so-called Fermi Paradox (which, granted, is a paradox only if one accepts the optimistic parameters that most observers apply to the Drake equation). One common response is that a civilization may obliterate itself once it reaches radio capability. This explanation might be acceptable if we were talking about only a few such civilizations, but with the common SETI assumptions implying billions of them, it is not credible to believe that everyone of them destroyed itself.

Before the next century is over, human beings will no longer be the most intelligent of capable type of entity on the planet.

The Terminator' is not an impossibility. I think that symbolizes the downside of artificial intelligence ... but technology has a big downside in general. There is a bigger downside to not pursuing it.

A primary reason that evolution—of life-forms or technology—speeds up is that it builds on its own increasing order.

What's not fully realized is that Moore's Law was not the first paradigm to bring exponential growth to computers. We had electromechanical calculators, relay-based computers, vacuum tubes, and transistors. Every time one paradigm ran out of steam, another took over.

Order... is information that fits a purpose.

Once a computer achieves human intelligence it will necessarily roar past it.

The primary political and philosophical issue of the next century will be the definition of who we are.

This interest in trends took on a life of its own, and I began to project some of them using what I call the Law of Accelerating Returns.

This... was the religion that I was raised with: veneration for human creativity and the power of ideas.