Ray Kurzweil
Ray Kurzweil
Raymond "Ray" Kurzweilis an American author, computer scientist, inventor and futurist. Aside from futurology, 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...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionInventor
Date of Birth12 February 1948
CountryUnited States of America
One could run these automata for trillions or even trillions of trillions of iterations, and the image would remain at the same limited level of complexity. They do not evolve into, say, insects, or humans, or Chopin preludes.
Exponential growth looks like nothing is happening, and then suddenly you get this explosion at the end,
I really do believe it is feasible to slow down the aging process, ... We call that a bridge to a bridge to a bridge -- to the full flowering of the biotechnology revolution.
The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it.
Find your passion, learn how to add value to it, and commit to a lifetime of learning.
A successful person isn't necessarily better than her less successful peers at solving problems; her pattern-recognition facilities have just learned what problems are worth solving.
Our technology, our machines, is part of our humanity. We created them to extend ourselves, and that is what is unique about human beings.
Supercomputers will achieve one human brain capacity by 2010, and personal computers will do so by about 2020.
There are downsides to every technology. Fire kept us warm, but also burned down our villages.
Intuition is linear; our imaginations are weak. Even the brightest of us only extrapolate from what we know now; for the most part, we're afraid to really stretch.
Our intuition about the future is linear. But the reality of information technology is exponential, and that makes a profound difference. If I take 30 steps linearly, I get to 30. If I take 30 steps exponentially, I get to a billion.
Does God exist? Well, I would say, not yet
Biological evolution is too slow for the human species. Over the next few decades, it's going to be left in the dust.