Ray Kurzweil > Quotes

“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, The Age of Spiritual Machines

“Play is just another version of work”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“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

“Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world. —ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“How Smart Is a Rock? To appreciate the feasibility of computing with no energy and no heat, consider the computation that takes place in an ordinary rock. Although it may appear that nothing much is going on inside a rock, the approximately 1025 (ten trillion trillion) atoms in a kilogram of matter are actually extremely active. Despite the apparent solidity of the object, the atoms are all in motion, sharing electrons back and forth, changing particle spins, and generating rapidly moving electromagnetic fields. All of this activity represents computation, even if not very meaningfully organized. We’ve already shown that atoms can store information at a density of greater than one bit per atom, such as in computing systems built from nuclear magnetic-resonance devices. University of Oklahoma researchers stored 1,024 bits in the magnetic interactions of the protons of a single molecule containing nineteen hydrogen atoms.51 Thus, the state of the rock at any one moment represents at least 1027 bits of memory.”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“In mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them. —John von Neumann”
― Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed

“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, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed

“you create your brain from the input you get.”
― Ray Kurzweil, Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever

“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, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed

“Our sole responsibility is to produce something smarter than we are; any problems beyond that are not ours to solve …”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“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, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“Yes, well, the subjective experience is the opposite of the objective reality”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence

“The story of evolution unfolds with increasing levels of abstraction.”
― Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed

“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, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“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, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“We are a pattern that changes slowly but has stability and continuity, even though the stuff constituting the pattern changes quickly.”
― Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed

“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, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“The essential thing is to recognize that consciousness is a biological process like digestion, lactation, photosynthesis, or mitosis”;”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“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, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“Human beings have only a weak ability to process logic, but a very deep core capability of recognizing patterns. To do logical thinking, we need to use the neocortex, which is basically a large pattern recognizer. It is not an ideal mechanism for performing logical transformations, but it is the only facility we have for the job. Compare, for example, how a human plays chess to how a typical computer chess program works. Deep Blue, the computer that defeated Garry Kasparov, the human world chess champion, in 1997 was capable of analyzing the logical implications of 200 million board positions (representing different move-countermove sequences) every second. (That can now be done, by the way, on a few personal computers.) Kasparov was asked how many positions he could analyze each second, and he said it was less than one. How is it, then, that he was able to hold up to Deep Blue at all? The answer is the very strong ability humans have to recognize patterns. However, we need to train this facility, which is why not everyone can play master chess.”
― Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed

“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, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed

“Electronic circuits are millions of times faster than our biological circuits. At first we will have to devote all of this speed increase to compensating for the relative lack of parallelism in our computers, but ultimately the digital neocortex will be much faster than the biological variety and will only continue to increase in speed.”
― Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed

“Intelligence is that faculty of mind by which order is perceived in a situation previously considered disordered.” —R. W. Young”
― Ray Kurzweil, Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever

“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, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“The Singularity will represent the culmination of the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that is still human but that transcends our biological roots. There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality. If you wonder what will remain unequivocally human in such a world, it’s simply this quality: ours is the species that inherently seeks to extend its physical and mental reach beyond current limitations.”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. —GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, “MAXIMS FOR REVOLUTIONISTS,”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“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, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed

“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, Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever

“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 Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology