Ray Kurzweil - The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999)

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

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

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

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

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