Raymond Kurzweil Quotes

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.

Neither noise nor information is predictable.

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

The Law of Time and Chaos: In a process, the time interval between salient events (that is, events that change the nature of the process, or significantly affect the future of the process) expands of contracts along with the amount of chaos.

So whether information represents one man's sentimental archive, the accumulating knowledge base of the human-machine civilization, or the mind files stored in our brains, what can we conclude about the ultimate longevity of software? The answer is simply this: Information lasts only so long as someone cares about it. The conclusion that I've come [...] is that there is no set of hardware and software standards existing today, nor any likely to come along, that will provide any reasonable level of confidence that the stored information will still be accessible [...] decades from now.

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

To this day I remain convinced of this basic philosophy: no matter what quandries we face... there is an idea that can enable us to prevail.

The Singularity will allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains. We will gain power over our fates. Our mortality will be in our own hands. We will be able to live as long as we want (a subtly different statement from saying we will live forever). We will fully understand human thinking and will vastly extend and expand its reach. By the end of this century, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will be trillions of trillions of times more powerful than unaided human intelligence.

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

Order... is information that fits a purpose.

My own field, pattern recognition... is the fundamental capability of the human brain. We can't think fast enough to logically analyze situations quickly, so we rely on our powers of pattern recognition.

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

We live in a three-dimensional world, and our brains are organized in three dimensions, so we might as well compute in three dimensions. ...Right now, chips, even though they're very dense, are flat.

this will become the size of blood cells and we will be able to put intelligence inside of our bodies and brains to keep ourselves healthier.

I will be able to talk to this re-creation. Ultimately, it will be so realistic it will be like talking to my father.