Top 15 Raymond Kurzweil Quotes

Creating an avatar of this sort is one way of embodying that information in a way that human beings can interact with. It is inherently human to transcend limitations.

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.

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.

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

You can certainly argue that, philosophically, that is not your father. That is a replica, but I can actually make a strong case that it would be more like my father than my father would be, were he to live.

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

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

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.

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.

So What's Left? Let's consider where we are, circa early 2030s. We've eliminated the heart, lungs, red and white blood cells, platelets, pancreas, thyroid and all the hormone-producing organs, kidneys, bladder, liver, lower esophagus, stomach, small intestines, large intestines, and bowel. What we have left at this point is the skeleton, skin, sex organs, sensory organs, mouth and upper esophagus, and brain.

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.

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.

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

Ultimately, the entire universe will become saturated with our intelligence. This is the destiny of the universe.

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