Ray Kurzweil Quotes

We cannot rely on trial-and-error approaches to deal with existential risks… We need to vastly increase our investment in developing specific defensive technologies… We are at the critical stage today for biotechnology, and we will reach the stage where we need to directly implement defensive technologies for nanotechnology during the late teen years of this century… A self-replicating pathogen, whether biological or nanotechnology based, could destroy our civilization in a matter of days or weeks.
Ray Kurzweil
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. DuringWorld 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
Take death for example. A great deal of our effort goes into avoiding it. We make extraordinary efforts to delay it, and often consider its intrusion a tragic event. Yet we’d find it hard to live without it. 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 story of evolution unfolds with increasing levels of abstraction.
Ray Kurzweil
The evolution of animal behavior does constitute a learning process, but it is learning by the species, not by the individual, and the fruits of this learning process are encoded in DNA.
Ray Kurzweil
Recall the metaphor I used in chapter 4 relating the random movements of molecules in a gas to the random movements of evolutionary change. Molecules in a gas move randomly with no apparent sense of direction. Despite this, virtually every molecule in a gas in a beaker, given sufficient time, will leave the beaker. I noted that this provides a perspective on an important question concerning the evolution of intelligence. Like molecules in a gas, evolutionary changes also move every which way with no apparent direction. Yet we nonetheless see a movement toward greater complexity and greater intelligence, indeed to evolution’s supreme achievement of evolving a neocortex capable of hierarchical thinking. So we are able to gain an insightinto how an apparently purposeless and directionless process can achieve an apparently purposeful result in one field (biological evolution) by looking at another field (thermodynamics).
Ray Kurzweil
Play is just another version of work
Ray Kurzweil
The purposeful destruction of information is the essence of intelligent work.
Ray Kurzweil
The pattern recognition theory of mind that I articulate in this book is based on a different fundamental unit: not the neuron itself, but rather an assembly of neurons, which I estimate to number around a hundred. The wiring and synaptic strengths within each unit are relatively stable and determined genetically—that is the organization within each pattern recognition module is determined by genetic design. Learning takes place in the creation of connections between these units, not within them, and probably in the synaptic strengths of the interunit connections.
Ray Kurzweil
The intelligence we will create from the reverse-engineering of the brain will have access to its own source code and will be able to rapidly improve itself in an accelerating iterative design cycle. Although there is considerable plasticity in the biological human brain, as we have seen, it does have a relatively fixed architecture, which cannot be significantly modified, as well as a limited capacity. We are unable to increase its 300 million pattern recognizers to, say, 400 million unless we do so nonbiologically. Once we can achieve that, there will be no reason to stop at a particular level of capability. We can go on to make it a billion pattern recognizers, or a trillion.
Ray Kurzweil