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Ray Kurzweil Quotes

Raymond "Ray" Kurzweil is an American author, computer scientist, inventor and futurist. Aside from futurism, he is involved in fields such as optical character recognition , text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He has written books on health, artificial intelligence , transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism. Kurzweil is a public advocate for the futurist and transhumanist movements, and gives public talks to share his optimistic outlook on life extension technologies and the future of nanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology.

Kurzweil was the principal inventor of the first charge-coupled device flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first commercial text-to-speech synthesizer, the Kurzweil K250 music synthesizer capable of simulating the sound of the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.

Kurzweil received the 1999 National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the United States' highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. He was the recipient of the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize for 2001, the world's largest for innovation. And in 2002 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office. He has received twenty-one honorary doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents. Kurzweil has been described as a "restless genius" by The Wall Street Journal and "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes. PBS included Kurzweil as one of 16 "revolutionaries who made America" along with other inventors of the past two centuries. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among the "most fascinating" entrepreneurs in the United States and called him "Edison's rightful heir".

Kurzweil has written seven books, five of which have been national bestsellers. The Age of Spiritual Machines has been translated into 9 languages and was the #1 best-selling book on Amazon in science. Kurzweil's book The Singularity Is Near was a New York Times bestseller, and has been the #1 book on Amazon in both science and philosophy. Kurzweil speaks widely to audiences both public and private and regularly delivers keynote speeches at industry conferences like DEMO, SXSW and TED. He maintains the news website KurzweilAI.net, which has over three million readers annually.

✵ 12. February 1948
Ray Kurzweil photo
Ray Kurzweil: 40   quotes 3   likes

Famous Ray Kurzweil Quotes

“My own field, pattern recognition… is the fundamental capability of the human brain. We can't think fast enough to logically analyze situations quickly, so we rely on our powers of pattern recognition.”

Ray Kurzweil

"The Singularity," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

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

Ray Kurzweil

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (1999)

“Ultimately this virtual reality will go inside the brain and then really will be fully merging with all of the senses. Virtual reality ultimately will have all of the features of real reality plus a lot more that you can chose from millions of virtual environments. You can be someone else, you don’t have to pick the same boring body every time you can be different people and different situations and over time our biological bodies will become obsolete. We’ll have many bodies and we’ll look back at the idea of having one body and being dependent on just one biological body and having no back-up for a mind file as a very primitive time”

Ray Kurzweil

Transcendent Man (2009)

“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.”

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

“The purposeful destruction of information is the essence of intelligent work.”

Ray Kurzweil

Source: The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence

Ray Kurzweil Quotes about time

“One of the advantages of being in the futurism business is that by the time your readers are able to find fault with your forecasts, it is too late for them to ask for their money back.”

Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil: The Library Journal, The virtual book revisited http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-virtual-book-revisited

“Until such time that computers at least match human intelligence in every dimension, it will always remain possible for skeptics to say the glass is half empty. Every new achievement of AI can be dismissed by pointing out other goals that have not yet been accomplished. Indeed, this is the frustration of the AI practitioner: once an AI goal is achieved, it is no longer considered as falling within the realm of AI and become instead just a useful general technique. AI is thus often regarded as the set of problems that have not yet been solved.”

Ray Kurzweil

Source: The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005), p. 441

“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

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (1999)

“What's not fully realized is that Moore's Law was not the first paradigm to bring exponential growth to computers. We had electromechanical calculators, relay-based computers, vacuum tubes, and transistors. Every time one paradigm ran out of steam, another took over.”

Ray Kurzweil

"The Singularity," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

“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

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (1999)

“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 Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (1999)

Ray Kurzweil Quotes about intelligence

“this will become the size of blood cells and we will be able to put intelligence inside of our bodies and brains to keep ourselves healthier.”

Ray Kurzweil

Futurist Ray Kurweil Bring Dead Father Back to Life http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/futurist-ray-kurzweil-bring-dead-father-back-life/story?id14267712 (2011)

“The Terminator' is not an impossibility. I think that symbolizes the downside of artificial intelligence … but technology has a big downside in general. There is a bigger downside to not pursuing it.”

Ray Kurzweil

Futurist Ray Kurweil Bring Dead Father Back to Life http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/futurist-ray-kurzweil-bring-dead-father-back-life/story?id=14267712 (2011)

“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 Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (1999)

Ray Kurzweil Quotes

“We live in a three-dimensional world, and our brains are organized in three dimensions, so we might as well compute in three dimensions. …Right now, chips, even though they're very dense, are flat.”

Ray Kurzweil

"The Singularity," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

World

“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

"The Singularity," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

Water

“Creating an avatar of this sort is one way of embodying that information in a way that human beings can interact with. It is inherently human to transcend limitations.”

Ray Kurzweil

Futurist Ray Kurweil Bring Dead Father Back to Life http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/futurist-ray-kurzweil-bring-dead-father-back-life/story?id=14267712 (August 9, 2011)
Futurist Ray Kurweil Bring Dead Father Back to Life http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/futurist-ray-kurzweil-bring-dead-father-back-life/story?id14267712 (2011)

Way

“Neither noise nor information is predictable.”

Ray Kurzweil

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (1999)

“I think all human beings are and should be fearful [of death, but realizing that death is a real tragedy.”

Ray Kurzweil

Futurist Ray Kurweil Bring Dead Father Back to Life http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/futurist-ray-kurzweil-bring-dead-father-back-life/story?id14267712 (2011)

Death , Fear , Thinking

“We use one stage of technology to create the next stage, which is why technology accelerates, why it grows in power.”

Ray Kurzweil

"The Singularity," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

“Order… is information that fits a purpose.”

Ray Kurzweil

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (1999)

“You can certainly argue that, philosophically, that is not your father. That is a replica, but I can actually make a strong case that it would be more like my father than my father would be, were he to live.”

Ray Kurzweil

Futurist Ray Kurweil Bring Dead Father Back to Life http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/futurist-ray-kurzweil-bring-dead-father-back-life/story?id14267712 (2011)

Strong

“So whether information represents one man's sentimental archive, the accumulating knowledge base of the human-machine civilization, or the mind files stored in our brains, what can we conclude about the ultimate longevity of software? The answer is simply this: Information lasts only so long as someone cares about it. The conclusion that I've come […] is that there is no set of hardware and software standards existing today, nor any likely to come along, that will provide any reasonable level of confidence that the stored information will still be accessible […] decades from now.”

Ray Kurzweil

Source: The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005), p. 329

Confidence , Knowledge

“I will be able to talk to this re-creation. Ultimately, it will be so realistic it will be like talking to my father.”

Ray Kurzweil

Futurist Ray Kurweil Bring Dead Father Back to Life http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/futurist-ray-kurzweil-bring-dead-father-back-life/story?id14267712 (2011)

“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 Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005)

Idea

“The power of ideas to transform the world is itself accelerating.”

Ray Kurzweil

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005)

World , Idea

“The twentieth century was like twenty years' worth of change at today's rate of change.”

Ray Kurzweil

"The Singularity," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

Change

“If you use conventional data compression on the [human brain's] genome, you get about 23 million bytes (a small fraction of the size of Microsoft Word), which is a level of complexity we can handle.”

Ray Kurzweil

"The Singularity," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

“So What's Left? Let's consider where we are, circa early 2030s. We've eliminated the hearth, lungs, red and white blood cells, platelets, pancreas, thyroid and all the hormone-producing organs, kidneys, bladder, liver, lower esophagus, stomach, small intestines, large intestines, and bowel. What we have left at this point is the skeleton, skin, sex organs, sensory organs, mouth and upper esophagus, and brain.”

Ray Kurzweil

Source: The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005), p. 307

Sex

“The primary political and philosophical issue of the next century will be the definition of who we are.”

Ray Kurzweil

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (1999)

“The basic feasibility of communicating in both directions between electronic devices and biological neurons has already been demonstrated.”

Ray Kurzweil

"The Singularity," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

Communication

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

Ray Kurzweil

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (1999)

Life , Speed

“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

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005)

Truth , Education

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

Ray Kurzweil

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (1999)

“This interest in trends took on a life of its own, and I began to project some of them using what I call the Law of Accelerating Returns.”

Ray Kurzweil

"The Singularity," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

Life , Law

“This… was the religion that I was raised with: veneration for human creativity and the power of ideas.”

Ray Kurzweil

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005)

Religion , Idea

“Consciousness becomes a matter of philosophical debate; it's not scientifically reliable.”

Ray Kurzweil

"The Singularity," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

“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”

Ray Kurzweil

although Alan Turing had an inkling of it in 1950
The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (1999)

Speed

“I quickly realized that you had to have a good idea of the future if you were going to succeed as an inventor.”

Ray Kurzweil

"The Singularity," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

Idea , Future

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