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

The lesson of these new insights is that our brain is entirely like any of our physical muscles: Use it or lose it. — 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

I envision some years from now that the majority of search queries will be answered without you actually asking. It'll just know this is something that you're going to want to see. — 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

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 You and I are walking around with outdated software running in our bodies, which evolved in a very different era.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

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

There is one brain organ that is optimised for understanding and articulating logical processes and that is the outer layer of the brain, called the cerebral cortex. Unlike the rest of the brain, this relatively recent evolutionary development is rather flat, only about 0.32 cm (0.12 in) thick and includes a mere 6 million neurons. This elaborately folded organ provides us with what little competence we do possess for understanding what we do and who we do it. — 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

Mobile phones are misnamed. They should be called gateways to human knowledge. — 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

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

Supercomputers will achieve one human brain capacity by 2010, and personal computers will do so by about 2020. — Ray Kurzweil

Once the interlude was over and I was released, I fled the room and, taking the stairs two at a time, found refuge in a dank corner of the basement filled with potatoes and mice. I stayed there until dinner, doing my best to stop crying by staring at the glowing face of my father's wristwatch. — Allen Kurzweil

The key issue as to whether or not a non-biological entity deserves rights really comes down to whether or not it's conscious ... Does it have feelings? — Ray Kurzweil

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

We appear to be programmed with the idea that there are 'things' outside of our self, and some are conscious, and some are not. — 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

There are no inherent barriers to our being able to reverse engineer the operating principles of human intelligence and replicate these capabilities in the more powerful computational substrates that will become available in the decades ahead. The human brain is a complex hierarchy of complex systems, but it does not represent a level of complexity beyond what we are already capable of handling. — 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

In his book The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Kurzweil identified a hugely important and fundamental property of technology: when you shift to an information-based environment, the pace of development jumps onto an exponential growth path and price/performance doubles every year or two. — Salim Ismail

do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success. - NIKOLA TESLA, 1896, INVENTOR OF ALTERNATING CURRENT — 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

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

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

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

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

Our primate ancestors was the development of a larger cerebral cortex as well as the development of increased volume of gray-matter tissue in certain regions of the brain.32 This change occurred, however, on the very slow timescale of biological evolution and still involves an inherent — Ray Kurzweil

But the big feature of human-level intelligence is not what it does when it works but what it does when it's stuck. - MARVIN MINSKY — Ray Kurzweil

This, then, was the religion that I was raised with: veneration for human creativity and the power of ideas. — 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

I'm working on artificial intelligence. Actually, natural language understanding, which is to get computers to understand the meaning of documents. — Ray Kurzweil

By 2029, computers will have emotional intelligence and be convincing as people. — 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

The intelligence we will create from the reverse-engineering of the brain will have access to its own source code and will be able to rapidly improve itself in an accelerating iterative design cycle. Although there is considerable plasticity in the biological human brain, as we have seen, it does have a relatively fixed architecture, which cannot be significantly modified, as well as a limited capacity. We are unable to increase its 300 million pattern recognizers to, say, 400 million unless we do so nonbiologically. Once we can achieve that, there will be no reason to stop at a particular level of capability. We can go on to make it a billion pattern recognizers, or a trillion. — 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

Contemporary philosopher Max More describes the goal of humanity as a transcendence to be achieved through science and technology steered by human values. — 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

Artificial intelligence will reach human levels by around 2029. Follow that out further to, say, 2045, we will have multiplied the intelligence, the human biological machine intelligence of our civilization a billion-fold. — Ray Kurzweil

Play is just another version of work — 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

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

In order for a digital neocortex to learn a new skill, it will still require many iterations of education, just as a biological neocortex does, but once a single digital neocortex somewhere and at some time learns something, it can share that knowledge with every other digital neocortex without delay. We can each have our own private neocortex extenders in the cloud, just as we have our own private stores of personal data today. — 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

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

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

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

Does God exist? Well, I would say, not yet — 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

People say we're running out of energy. That's only true if we stick with these old 19th century technologies. We are awash in energy from the sunlight. — Ray Kurzweil

If we could convert 0.03 percent of the sunlight that falls on the earth into energy, we could meet all of our projected needs for 2030. — 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

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

Our sole responsibility is to produce something smarter than we are; any problems beyond that are not ours to solve ... — Ray Kurzweil

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

Doing real world projects is, I think, the best way to learn and also to engage the world and find out what the world is all about. — Ray Kurzweil

I remember the beginnings of the Kurzweil reading machine. I was one of the first to meet Ray Kurzweil and purchase the reading machine in Boston. To think that the machine was at least two and a half large suitcases at the time, and now you have a camera and it takes a picture and you have sound. — Stevie Wonder

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

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

Machines can pool their resources, intelligence, and memories. Two machines - or one million machines - can join together to become one and then become separate again. Multiple machines can do both at the same time: become one and separate simultaneously. Humans call this falling in love, but our biological ability to do this is fleeting and unreliable. — Ray Kurzweil

Once we have inexpensive energy, we can readily and inexpensively convert the vast amount of dirty and salinated water we have on the planet to usable water. — Ray Kurzweil

Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity
technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light. — Ray Kurzweil

Aging is not one process. It's many different things going on that cause us to age. I have a program that at least slows down each of these different processes. — Ray Kurzweil

you create your brain from the input you get. — Ray Kurzweil

With the increasingly important role of intelligent machines in all phases of our lives
military, medical, economic and financial, political
it is odd to keep reading articles with titles such as Whatever Happened to Artificial Intelligence? This is a phenomenon that Turing had predicted: that machine intelligence would become so pervasive, so comfortable, and so well integrated into our information-based economy that people would fail even to notice it. — Ray Kurzweil

Sometimes people talk about conflict between humans and machines, and you can see that in a lot of science fiction. But the machines we're creating are not some invasion from Mars. We create these tools to expand our own reach. — Ray Kurzweil

A lot of movies about artificial intelligence envision that AI's will be very intelligent but missing some key emotional qualities of humans and therefore turn out to be very dangerous. — Ray Kurzweil

Recall the metaphor I used in chapter 4 relating the random movements of molecules in a gas to the random movements of evolutionary change. Molecules in a gas move randomly with no apparent sense of direction. Despite this, virtually every molecule in a gas in a beaker, given sufficient time, will leave the beaker. I noted that this provides a perspective on an important question concerning the evolution of intelligence. Like molecules in a gas, evolutionary changes also move every which way with no apparent direction. Yet we nonetheless see a movement toward greater complexity and greater intelligence, indeed to evolution's supreme achievement of evolving a neocortex capable of hierarchical thinking. So we are able to gain an insight
into how an apparently purposeless and directionless process can achieve an apparently purposeful result in one field (biological evolution) by looking at another field (thermodynamics). — 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

We have the means right now to live long enough to live forever. Existing knowledge can be aggressively applied to dramatically slow down aging processes so we can still be in vital health when the more radical life extending therapies from biotechnology and nanotechnology become available. But most baby boomers won't make it because they are unaware of the accelerating aging process in their bodies and the opportunity to intervene. — Ray Kurzweil

We're democratizing the tools of creativity. — Ray Kurzweil

When people have difficulty achieving regular releases of dopamine through these kinds of socially accepted activities, they will often seek a shortcut. — 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

Launching a breakthrough idea is like shooting skeet. People's needs change, so you must aim well ahead of the target to hit it. — 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

I'm an inventor. I became interested in long-term trends because an invention has to make sense in the world in which it is finished, not the world in which it is started. — Ray Kurzweil

We cannot rely on trial-and-error approaches to deal with existential risks ... We need to vastly increase our investment in developing specific defensive technologies ... We are at the critical stage today for biotechnology, and we will reach the stage where we need to directly implement defensive technologies for nanotechnology during the late teen years of this century ... A self-replicating pathogen, whether biological or nanotechnology based, could destroy our civilization in a matter of days or weeks. — Ray Kurzweil

GEORGE 2048: We like to think of it as one civilization. — 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