Ray Kurzweil Quotes

40 Sourced Quotes

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

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
Before the next century is over, human beings will no longer be the most intelligent of capable type of entity on the planet.

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
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
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
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 power of ideas to transform the world is itself accelerating.

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

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

Ray Kurzweil
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.

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

Ray Kurzweil
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

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

Ray Kurzweil
The purposeful destruction of information is the essence of intelligent work.

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
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 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.

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