Ray Kurzweil Quotes

40 Sourced Quotes

By the 2030s, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will predominate.

Ray Kurzweil
Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it.

Ray Kurzweil
The Law of Accelerating Returns: As order exponentially increases, time exponentially speeds up (that is, the time interval between salient events grows shorter as time passes). The Law... applies specifically to evolutionary processes.

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

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

Ray Kurzweil
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.

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

Ray Kurzweil
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.

Ray Kurzweil
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.

Ray Kurzweil
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.

Ray Kurzweil
A successful person isn't necessarily better than her less successful peers at solving problems; her pattern-recognition facilities have just learned what problems are worth solving.

Ray Kurzweil
To transcend means to "go beyond," but this need not compel us to an ornate dualist view that regards transcendent levels of reality (e.g., the spiritual level) to be not of this world. We can "go beyond" the "ordinary" powers of the material world through the power of patterns. Rather than a materialist, I would prefer to consider myself a "patternist." It's through the emergent powers of the pattern that we transcend.

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

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

Ray Kurzweil
Intelligence is: (a) the most complex phenomenon in the Universe; or (b) a profoundly simple process. The answer, of course, is (c) both of the above. It's another one of those great dualities that make life interesting.

Ray Kurzweil
Evolution is a process of creating patterns of increasing order....I believe that it's the evolution of patterns that constitutes the ultimate story of our world. Evolution works through indirection: each stage or epoch uses the information-processing methods of the previous epoch to create the next.

Ray Kurzweil
Although I'm not prepared to move up my prediction of a computer passing the Turing test by 2029, the progress that has been achieved in systems like Watson should give anyone substantial confidence that the advent of Turing-level AI is close at hand. If one were to create a version of Watson that was optimized for the Turing test, it would probably come pretty close.

Ray Kurzweil
By the time of the Singularity, there won't be a distinction between humans and technology. This is not because humans will have become what we think of as machines today, but rather machines will have progressed to be like humans and beyond. Technology will be the metaphorical opposable thumb that enables our next step in evolution.

Ray Kurzweil
The need to congregate workers in offices will gradually diminish.

Ray Kurzweil
By the end of this decade, computers will disappear as distinct physical objects, with displays built in our eyeglasses, and electronics woven in our clothing, providing full-immersion visual virtual reality.

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

Ray Kurzweil
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.

Ray Kurzweil
The story of evolution unfolds with increasing levels of abstraction.

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

Ray Kurzweil
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.

Ray Kurzweil
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.

Ray Kurzweil
Most inventions fail not because the R&D department can't get them to work but because the timing is wrong. Inventing is a lot like surfing: you have to anticipate and catch the wave at just the right moment.

Ray Kurzweil
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).

Ray Kurzweil
The Singularity denotes an event that will take place in the material world, the inevitable next step in the evolutionary process that started with biological evolution and has extended through human-directed technological evolution. however, it is precisely in the world of matter and energy that we encounter transcendence, a principal connotation of what people refer to as spirituality.

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

Ray Kurzweil