Raymond Kurzweil Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I quickly realized that you had to have a good idea of the future if you were going to succeed as an inventor.

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