Ray Kurzweil Quotes

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

Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

The profound aspect of technology is that once secrets are revealed, the magic doesn't disappear.

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.

Does God exist? Well, I would say, 'not yet'.

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

Information defines your personality, your memories, your skills.

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

Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it.

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.

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

What we spend our time on is probably the most important decision we make.

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

Death is a great tragedy…a profound loss…I don’t accept it…I think people are kidding themselves when they say they are comfortable with death.

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.

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.

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.

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

Play is just another version of work

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.

The story of evolution unfolds with increasing levels of abstraction.

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.

When I was a student at MIT, we all shared one computer and it took up a whole building. The computer in your cell phone today is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful. What now fits in your pocket 25 years from now will fit into a blood cell and will again be millions of times more cost effective.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

People talk philosophically, Oh, I don't want to live past 100.' You know, I'd like to hear them say that when they're 99.

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.

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.

We're democratizing the tools of creativity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A lot of movies about artificial intelligence envision that AIs will be very intelligent but missing some key emotional qualities of humans and therefore turn out to be very dangerous.

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.

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.

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

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

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