169 Quotes by Ray Kurzweil

Two billion years ago, our ancestors were microbes; a half-billion years ago, fish; a hundred million years ago, something like mice; ten million years ago, arboreal apes; and a million years ago, proto-humans puzzling out the taming of fire. Our evolutionary lineage is marked by mastery of change. In our time, the pace is quickening. – CARL SAGAN.

The brain is a three-pound mass you can hold in your hand that can conceive of a universe a hundred billion light years across. – Marian Diamond.

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.

The statistical methods underlying productivity measurements tend to factor out gains by essentially concluding that we still get only one dollar of products and services for a dollar, despite the fact that we get much more for that dollar.

This, then, was the religion that I was raised with: veneration for human creativity and the power of ideas.

Modernity sees humanity as having ascended from what is inferior to it – life begins in slime and ends in intelligence – whereas traditional cultures see it as descended from its superiors. As the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins puts the matter: “We are the only people who assume that we have ascended from apes. Everybody else takes it for granted that they are descended from gods.” – HUSTON SMITH16 Some philosophers hold.

Given that self-improving strong AI cannot be recalled, Yudkowsky points out that we need to “get it right the first time,” and that its initial design must have “zero nonrecoverable errors.”45.

Our brains are subject to either sudden or gradual decline with age, to self-destructive addictive behaviors, to depression and anxiety disorders, and to many other limitations, not to mention potentially catastrophic lapses of judgment.

Order is information that fits a purpose. The measure of order is the measure of how well the information fits the purpose.