Dan S

“In our own case we went from a pre-electricity, computerless society that used horses as its fastest land-based transportation to the sophisticated computational and communications technologies we have today in only two hundred years. My projections show, as noted above, that within another century we will multiply our intelligence by trillions of trillions. So only three hundred years will have been necessary to take us from the early stirrings of primitive mechanical technologies to a vast expansion of our intelligence and ability to communicate.”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near

“The combination of amino acids into proteins and of nucleic acids into strings of RNA established the basic paradigm of biology. Strings of RNA (and later DNA) that self-replicated (Epoch Two) provided a digital method to record the results of evolutionary experiments. Later on, the evolution of a species that combined rational thought (Epoch Three) with an opposable appendage (the thumb) caused a fundamental paradigm shift from biology to technology (Epoch Four). The upcoming primary paradigm shift will be from biological thinking to a hybrid combining biological and nonbiological thinking (Epoch Five), which will include “biologically inspired” processes resulting from the reverse engineering of biological brains.”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near

“I set the date for the Singularity—representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability—as 2045. The nonbiological intelligence created in that year will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today.”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“Robert Freitas estimates that eliminating a specific list comprising 50 percent of medically preventable conditions would extend human life expectancy to over 150 years.39 By preventing 90 percent of medical problems, life expectancy grows to over five hundred years. At 99 percent, we’d be over one thousand years. We can expect that the full realization of the biotechnology and nanotechnology revolutions will enable us to eliminate virtually all medical causes of death. As we move toward a nonbiological existence, we will gain the means of “backing ourselves up” (storing the key patterns underlying our knowledge, skills, and personality), thereby eliminating most causes of death as we know it.”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near