Ray Kurzweil Quotes

40 Sourced Quotes

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

Ray Kurzweil
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.

Ray Kurzweil
The fate of the universe is a decision yet to be made, one which we will intelligently consider when the time is right.

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

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

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

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