Raymond Kurzweil Quotes

If you use conventional data compression on the [human brain's] genome, you get about 23 million bytes (a small fraction of the size of Microsoft Word), which is a level of complexity we can handle.

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

The speed and density of computation have been doubling every three years (at the beginning of the twentieth century) to one year (at the end of the twentieth century), regardless of the type of hardware used. ...Despite many decades of progress since the first calculating equipment was used in the 1890 census, it was not until the mid-1960s that this phenomenon was even noticed (although Alan Turing had an inkling of it in 1950).

My spiritual education... took place at a Unitarian Church. The theme was "many paths to the truth." …even the inconsistencies were illuminating. It became apparent to me that the basic truths were profound enough to transcend apparent contradictions.

The twentieth century was like twenty years' worth of change at today's rate of change.

Sometimes, a deeper order—a better fit to a purpose—is achieved through simplification rather than further increases in complexity.

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

The ethical debates are like stones in a stream. The water runs around them. You haven't seen any biological technologies held up for one week by any of these debates.

Ultimately this virtual reality will go inside the brain and then really will be fully merging with all of the senses. Virtual reality ultimately will have all of the features of real reality plus a lot more that you can chose from millions of virtual environments. You can be someone else, you don’t have to pick the same boring body every time you can be different people and different situations and over time our biological bodies will become obsolete. We’ll have many bodies and we’ll look back at the idea of having one body and being dependent on just one biological body and having no back-up for a mind file as a very primitive time

The basic feasibility of communicating in both directions between electronic devices and biological neurons has already been demonstrated.

[[w:Deathism|I think all human beings are and should be fearful [of death]], but realizing that death is a real tragedy.

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

It is in the nature of exponential growth that events develop extremely slowly for extremely long periods of time, but as one glides through the knee of the curve, events erupt at an increasingly furious pace. And that is what we will experience as we enter the twenty-first century.

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.

One of the advantages of being in the futurism business is that by the time your readers are able to find fault with your forecasts, it is too late for them to ask for their money back.