“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)

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Ray Kurzweil 40
Author, scientist, inventor, and futurist 1948

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“…the big picture of our spiritual growth is not an event but the development of the habit of relationship with God.”

John Townsend (1952) Canadian clinical psychologist and author

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“America's business problem is that it is entering the twenty-first century with companies designed during the nineteenth century to work well in the twentieth. We need something entirely different”

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“Two extreme interpretations of atomism have persisted through centuries”

Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) Scottish industrial engineer

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Context: Two extreme interpretations of atomism have persisted through centuries: the näive assumption of objectively real indivisible pieces of matter, and the sophisticated view that "atom" is merely a name given to abstractions which it is convenient to assume in simplifying complex phenomena. The second perhaps stems from Ockham, who wrote in 1330 of "the fiction of abstract nouns"; from John Troland, who in 1704 interpreted material particles as mental fictions; and from countless others down to Ernst Mach, who after starting as a physical atomist came to regard atoms as "mental artifices" or "economical ways of symbolizing experience."
Both views have advantages...

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