Ray Kurzweil Quotes & Sayings

A Singularitarian is someone who understands the Singularity and has reflected on its meaning for his or her own life. — Ray Kurzweil

[In] 2029, I think, computers will match and exceed human intelligence in the ways we're now superior, like being funny, where we still have an edge. — Ray Kurzweil

Most long-range forecasts of what is technically feasible in future time periods dramatically underestimate the power of future developments because they are based on what I call the "intuitive linear" view of history rather than the "historical exponential" view. — Ray Kurzweil

Our everyday "commonsense" knowledge as a human being is even greater; "street smarts" actually require substantially more of our neocortex than "book smarts." Including this brings our estimate to well over 100 million patterns, taking into account the redundancy factor of about 100. — Ray Kurzweil

In the latest brain image studies, we can see real-time movies of individual interneuronal connections actually creating new synapses (connection points between neurons), so we can see our brain create our thoughts and in turn see our thoughts create our brain. — Ray Kurzweil

Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world. - ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER — Ray Kurzweil

In 1999, I said that in about a decade we would see technologies such as self-driving cars and mobile phones that could answer your questions, and people criticized these predictions as unrealistic. — Ray Kurzweil

Those with engineering skills will build tomorrow's genius computers. But those with the ability to create knowledge of any kind will be the ones who are best able to extract great value from them. The way to create value in the age of genius machines will be to compile and disseminate knowledge that other people will find useful. — Ray Kurzweil

The evolution of animal behavior does constitute a learning process, but it is learning by the species, not by the individual, and the fruits of this learning process are encoded in DNA. — Ray Kurzweil

Biology is a software process. Our bodies are made up of trillions of cells, each governed by this process. You and I are walking around with outdated software running in our bodies, which evolved in a very different era. — Ray Kurzweil

These chunks represent patterns (such as faces) as well as specific knowledge. For example, a world-class chess master is estimated to have mastered about 100,000 board positions. Shakespeare used 29,000 words but close to 100,000 meanings of those words. Development of expert systems in medicine indicate that humans can master about 100,000 concepts in a domain. If we estimate that this "professional" knowledge represents as little as 1 percent of the overall pattern and knowledge store of a human, we arrive at an estimate of 107 chunks. — Ray Kurzweil

So what used to fit in a building now fits in your pocket, what fits in your pocket now will fit inside a blood cell in 25 years. — Ray Kurzweil

The Blue Brain project expects to have a full human-scale simulation of the cerebral cortex by 2018. I think that's a little optimistic, actually, but I do make the case that by 2029 we will have very detailed models and simulations of all the different brain regions. — Ray Kurzweil

We come from goldfish, essentially, but that [doesn't] mean we turned around and killed all the goldfish. Maybe [the AIs] will feed us once a week ... . If you had a machine with a 10 to the 18th power IQ over humans, wouldn't you want it to govern, or at least control your economy? - SETH SHOSTAK — Ray Kurzweil

What we found was that rather than being haphazardly arranged or independent pathways, we find that all of the pathways of the brain taken together fit together in a single exceedingly simple structure. They basically look like a cube. They basically run in three perpendicular directions, and in each one of those three directions the pathways are highly parallel to each other and arranged in arrays. So, instead of independent spaghettis, we see that the connectivity of the brain is, in a sense, a single coherent structure. — Ray Kurzweil

Thus the twentieth century was gradually speeding up to today's rate of progress; its achievements, therefore, were equivalent to about twenty years of progress at the rate in 2000. We'll make another twenty years of progress in just fourteen years (by 2014), and then do the same again in only seven years. To express this another way, we won't experience one hundred years of technological advance in the twenty-first century; we will witness on the order of twenty thousand years of progress (again, when measured by today's rate of progress), or about one thousand times greater than what was achieved in the twentieth century. — Ray Kurzweil

Machines will follow a path that mirrors the evolution of humans. Ultimately, however, self-aware, self-improving machines will evolve beyond humans' ability to control or even understand them. — Ray Kurzweil

Intuition is linear; our imaginations are weak. Even the brightest of us only extrapolate from what we know now; for the most part, we're afraid to really stretch. — 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

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

Fredkin believes that the universe is very literally a computer and that it is being used by someone, or something, to solve a problem. It sounds like a good-news/bad-news joke: the good news is that our lives have purpose; the bad news is that their purpose is to help some remote hacker estimate pi to nine jillion decimal places. — Ray Kurzweil

The essential thing is to recognize that consciousness is a biological process like digestion, lactation, photosynthesis, or mitosis; — Ray Kurzweil

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an "intelligence explosion," and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make. - IRVING JOHN GOOD, "SPECULATIONS CONCERNING THE FIRST ULTRAINTELLIGENT MACHINE," 1965 — Ray Kurzweil

perform the equivalent of all human thought over the last ten thousand years (assumed at ten billion human brains for ten thousand years) in ten microseconds.64 If we examine the "Exponential Growth of Computing" chart (p. 70), we see that this amount of computing is estimated to be available for one thousand dollars by 2080. — Ray Kurzweil

As you go out to the 2040s, now the bulk of our thinking is out in the cloud. The biological portion of our brain didn't go away but the nonbiological portion will be much more powerful. And it will be uploaded automatically the way we back up everything now that's digital. — Ray Kurzweil

All of our schools need to bring 'learn from doing' into the mainstream education, not just afternoon. — Ray Kurzweil

The past is over; the present is fleeting; we live in the future. — Ray Kurzweil

Finally, our new brain needs a purpose. A purpose is expressed as a series of goals. In the case of our biological brains, our goals are established by the pleasure and fear centers that we have inherited from the old brain. These primitive drives were initially set by biological evolution to foster the survival of species, but the neocortex has enabled us to sublimate them. Watson's goal was to respond to Jeopardy! queries. Another simply stated goal could be to pass the Turing test. To do so, a digital brain would need a human narrative of its own fictional story so that it can pretend to be a biological human. It would also have to dumb itself down considerably, for any system that displayed the knowledge of, say, Watson would be quickly unmasked as nonbiological. — Ray Kurzweil

However, we have the benefits of the billions of years of evolution that have already taken place, which are responsible for the greatly increased order of complexity in the natural world. We can now benefit from it by using our evolved tools to reverse engineer the products of biological evolution (most importantly, the human brain). — Ray Kurzweil

De Grey describes his goal as "engineered negligible senescence" - stopping the body and brain from becoming more frail and disease-prone as it grows older.18 As he explains, "All the core knowledge needed to develop engineered negligible senescence is already in our possession - it mainly just needs to be pieced together."19 De Grey believes we'll demonstrate "robustly rejuvenated" mice - mice that are functionally younger than before being treated and with the life extension to prove it - within ten years, and he points out that this achievement will have a dramatic effect on public opinion. Demonstrating that we can reverse the aging process in an animal that shares 99 percent of our genes will profoundly challenge the common wisdom that aging and death are inevitable. Once robust rejuvenation is confirmed in an animal, there will be enormous competitive pressure to translate these results into human therapies, which should appear five to ten years later. — Ray Kurzweil

The first idea is that human progress is exponential (that is, it expands by repeatedly multiplying by a constant) rather than linear (that is, expanding by repeatedly adding a constant). Linear versus exponential: Linear growth is steady; exponential growth becomes explosive. — Ray Kurzweil

Even by common wisdom, there seem to be both people and objects in my dream that are outside myself, but clearly they were created in myself and are part of me, they are mental constructs in my own brain. — Ray Kurzweil

Human life without death would be something other than human; consciousness of mortality gives rise to our deepest longings and greatest accomplishments. - LEON KASS, CHAIR OF THE PRESIDENTIAL COMMISSION ON BIOETHICS, 2003 — Ray Kurzweil

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

Nature, and the natural human condition, generates tremendous suffering. We have the means to overcome that, and we should deploy it. — Ray Kurzweil

As we gradually learn to harness the optimal computing capacity of matter, our intelligence will spread through the universe at (or exceeding) the speed of light, eventually leading to a sublime, universe wide awakening. — Ray Kurzweil

If we were building a consciousness detector, Searle would want it to ascertain that it was squirting biological neurotransmitters. American philosopher Daniel Dennett (born in 1942) would be more flexible on substrate, but might want to determine whether or not the system contained a model of itself and of its own performance. That view comes closer to my own, but at its core is still a philosophical assumption. — Ray Kurzweil

We'll be able to have very intelligent, little robots with computers going inside our bloodstream, keeping us healthy from inside, destroying cancer at the level of one cell. — Ray Kurzweil

It could be simply an accident of fate that our brains are too weak to understand themselves. Think of the lowly giraffe, for instance, whose brain is obviously far below the level required for self-understanding - yet it is remarkably similar to our brain. — Ray Kurzweil

Most of the complexity of a human neuron is devoted to maintaining its life-support functions, not its information-processing capabilities. Ultimately, we will be able to port our mental processes to a more suitable computational substrate. Then our minds won't have to stay so small. — Ray Kurzweil

Find your passion, learn how to add value to it, and commit to a lifetime of learning. — Ray Kurzweil

My mission at Google is to develop natural language understanding with a team and in collaboration with other researchers at Google. — Ray Kurzweil

I consider myself an inventor, entrepreneur, and author. — Ray Kurzweil

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

One cubic inch of nanotube circuitry, once fully developed, would be up to one hundred million times more powerful than the human brain.9 — Ray Kurzweil

Another error that prognosticators make is to consider the transformations that will result from a single trend in today's world as if nothing else will change. A good example is the concern that radical life extension will result in overpopulation and the exhaustion of limited material resources to sustain human life, which ignores comparably radical wealth creation from nanotechnology and strong AI. For example, nanotechnology-based manufacturing devices in the 2020s will be capable of creating almost any physical product from inexpensive raw materials and information. — Ray Kurzweil

When you talk to a human in 2035, you'll be talking to someone that's a combination of biological and non-biological intelligence. — Ray Kurzweil

New technologies can be used for destructive purposes. The answer is to develop rapid-response systems for new dangers like a bioterrorist creating a new biological virus. — Ray Kurzweil

We are beginning to see intimations of this in the implantation of computer devices into the human body. — Ray Kurzweil

I do have to pick my priorities. Nobody can do everything. — Ray Kurzweil

A primary reason that people believe that life is getting worse is because our information about the problems of the world has steadily improved. If there is a battle today somewhere on the planet, we experience it almost as if we were there. During
World War II, tens of thousands of people might perish in a battle, and if the public could see it at all it was in a grainy newsreel in a movie theater weeks later. During World War I a small elite could read about the progress of the conflict in the newspaper
(without pictures). During the nineteenth century there was almost no access to news in a timely fashion for anyone. — Ray Kurzweil

Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle - they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments. - ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD — Ray Kurzweil

Although the Singularity has many faces, its most important implication is this: our technology will match and then vastly exceed the refinement and suppleness of what we regard as the best of human traits. — Ray Kurzweil

The software programs that make our body run ... were evolved in very different times. We'd like to actually change those programs. One little software program, called the fat insulin receptor gene, basically says, 'Hold onto every calorie, because the next hunting season may not work out so well.' That was in the interests of the species tens of thousands of years ago. We'd like to turn that program off. — Ray Kurzweil

Given that self-improving strong AI cannot be recalled, Yudkowsky points out that we need to "get it right the first time," and that its initial design must have "zero nonrecoverable errors."45 — Ray Kurzweil

Biological evolution is too slow for the human species. Over the next few decades, it's going to be left in the dust. — Ray Kurzweil

As long as there is an AI shortcoming in any such area of endeavor, skeptics will point to that area as an inherent bastion of permanent human superiority over the capabilities of our own creations. This book will argue, however, that within several decades information-based technologies will encompass all human knowledge and proficiency, ultimately including the pattern-recognition powers, problem-solving skills, and emotional and moral intelligence of the human brain itself. — Ray Kurzweil

By 2009, computers will disappear. Displays will be written directly onto our retinas by devices in our eyeglasses and contact lenses. — Ray Kurzweil

By failing to engage it in intellectually challenging activities, your brain will fail to grow new connections, and it will indeed become disorganized and ultimately dysfunctional. The converse is also true for both body and brain. If someone who has not been physically active for a sustained period starts a program of physical therapy and regular exercise, she can regain her muscle mass and tone within a matter of months. The same thing is true of your brain. — Ray Kurzweil

By the time we get to the 2040s, we'll be able to multiply human intelligence a billionfold. That will be a profound change that's singular in nature. Computers are going to keep getting smaller and smaller. Ultimately, they will go inside our bodies and brains and make us healthier, make us smarter. — Ray Kurzweil

I think we are evolving rapidly into one world culture. It's certainly one world economy. With billions of people online, I think we'll appreciate the wisdom in many different traditions as we learn more about them. People were very isolated and didn't know anything about other religions 100 years ago. — Ray Kurzweil

Our intuition about the future is linear. But the reality of information technology is exponential, and that makes a profound difference. If I take 30 steps linearly, I get to 30. If I take 30 steps exponentially, I get to a billion. — Ray Kurzweil

Yes, well, the subjective experience is the opposite of the objective reality — Ray Kurzweil

S-adenosyl-methionine (SAMe) is a natural derivative of an amino acid normally produced by the body, and it plays a role in methylation (see Chapter 5). Levels of SAMe in the body often become depleted by middle age.
Multiple clinical trials have shown that SAMe provides substantial benefit for patients with depression. This effect occurs relatively quickly, unlike the requirement to build up levels in the bloodstream that accompanies some prescription drugs for depression. It is, therefore, an effective, natural, and quick-acting treatment for mild depression. Human trials have also shown benefits for strengthening the liver and for relief from osteoarthritis. — 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

electron-beam lithography, — Ray Kurzweil

Shaped a little like a loaf of French country bread, our brain is a crowded chemistry lab, bustling with nonstop neural conversations. Imagine the brain, that shiny mound of being, that mouse-gray parliament of cells, that dream factory, that petit tyrant inside a ball of bone, that huddle of neurons calling all the plays, that little everywhere, that fickle pleasuredome, that wrinkled wardrobe of selves stuffed into the skull like too many clothes into a gym bag. - Diane Ackerman — Ray Kurzweil

My view is that consciousness, the seat of "personalness," is the ultimate reality, and is also scientifically impenetrable. In other words, there is no scientific test one can postulate that would definitively prove its existence in another entity. We assume that other biological human persons, at least those who are at least acting conscious, are indeed conscious. But this too is an assumption, and this shared human consensus breaks down when we go beyond human experience (e.g., the debate on animal consciousness, and by extension animal rights). — Ray Kurzweil

No matter what problem you encounter, whether it's a grand challenge for humanity or a personal problem of your own, there's an idea out there that can overcome it. And you can find that idea. — Ray Kurzweil

There are downsides to every technology. Fire kept us warm, but also burned down our villages. — Ray Kurzweil

Most major universities now provide extensive courses online, many of which are free. MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative has been a leader in this effort. MIT — Ray Kurzweil

The telephone is virtual reality in that you can meet with someone as if you are together, at least for the auditory sense. — Ray Kurzweil

Modernity sees humanity as having ascended from what is inferior to it - life begins in slime and ends in intelligence - whereas traditional cultures see it as descended from its superiors. As the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins puts the matter: "We are the only people who assume that we have ascended from apes. Everybody else takes it for granted that they are descended from gods." - HUSTON SMITH16 — Ray Kurzweil

Information defines your personality, your memories, your skills. — Ray Kurzweil

Emotional intelligence is what humans are good at and that's not a sideshow. That's the cutting edge of human intelligence. — Ray Kurzweil

A thousand-bit quantum computer would vastly outperform any conceivable DNA computer, or for that matter any conceivable nonquantum computer. — Ray Kurzweil

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

We are a pattern that changes slowly but has stability and continuity, even though the stuff constituting the pattern changes quickly. — Ray Kurzweil

All different forms of human expression, art, science, are going to become expanded, by expanding our intelligence. — Ray Kurzweil

Increasing complexity on its own is not, however, the ultimate goal or end-product of these evolutionary processes. Evolution results in better answers, not necessarily more complicated ones. Sometimes a superior solution is a simpler one. — Ray Kurzweil

By 2010 computers will disappear. They'll be so small, they'll be embedded in our clothing, in our environment. Images will be written directly to our retina, providing full-immersion virtual reality, augmented real reality. We'll be interacting with virtual personalities. — Ray Kurzweil

Our technology, our machines, is part of our humanity. We created them to extend ourselves, and that is what is unique about human beings. — 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

Science fiction is the great opportunity to speculate on what could happen. It does give me, as a futurist, scenarios. — Ray Kurzweil

We only have to capture 1/10,000th of the solar energy landing on earth to completely satisfy all our energy needs. — Ray Kurzweil

Humans feel deeply the suffering of their friends and allies and easily discount/dismiss the comparable experience of their enemies. — Ray Kurzweil

I decided to be an inventor when I was five. My parents had given me a few various enrichment toys like erector sets, and for some reason I had the idea that if I put things together just the right way, I could create the intended effect. — Ray Kurzweil

It is doubling now every two years. Doubling every two years means multiplying by 1,000 in 20 years. At that rate we'll meet 100 percent of our energy needs in 20 years. — Ray Kurzweil

Von Neumann makes two important observations here: acceleration and singularity. The first idea is that human progress is exponential (that is, it expands by repeatedly multiplying by a constant) rather than linear (that is, expanding by repeatedly adding a constant). — 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

Inflammation in the body) is a very healthy 0.01, and all of my other indexes (for heart disease, diabetes, and other conditions) are at ideal levels. — 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

The pattern recognition theory of mind that I articulate in this book is based on a different fundamental unit: not the neuron itself, but rather an assembly of neurons, which I estimate to number around a hundred. The wiring and synaptic strengths within each unit are relatively stable and determined genetically - that is the organization within each pattern recognition module is determined by genetic design. Learning takes place in the creation of connections between these units, not within them, and probably in the synaptic strengths of the interunit connections. — Ray Kurzweil

If you write a blog post, you've got something to say; you're not just creating words and synonyms. We'd like the computers to actually pick up on that semantic meaning. — Ray Kurzweil

Play is just another version of work — Ray Kurzweil

It needs only to be good enough, which in the case of our species meant a level of intelligence sufficient to enable us to outwit the competitors in our ecological niche — 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

The purposeful destruction of information is the essence of intelligent work. — 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

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