Ray Kurzweil - The Singularity Is Near (2005)

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

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
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 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
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
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 power of ideas to transform the world is itself accelerating.

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

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
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
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