Quotes from The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

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

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

“Most long-range forecasts of what is technically feasible in future time periods dramatically underestimate the power of future developments because they are based on what I call the “intuitive linear” view of history rather than the “historical exponential” view.”
― Ray Kurzweil, quote from 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, quote from The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“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, quote from The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“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, quote from 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, quote from The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“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, quote from The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“A thousand-bit quantum computer would vastly outperform any conceivable DNA computer, or for that matter any conceivable nonquantum computer.”
― Ray Kurzweil, quote from The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“Most of the complexity of a human neuron is devoted to maintaining its life-support functions, not its information-processing capabilities. Ultimately, we will be able to port our mental processes to a more suitable computational substrate. Then our minds won’t have to stay so small.”
― Ray Kurzweil, quote from The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

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

“Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever,”
― Ray Kurzweil, quote from The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“Contemporary philosopher Max More describes the goal of humanity as a transcendence to be “achieved through science and technology steered by human values.”
― Ray Kurzweil, quote from 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, quote from The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“Thus the twentieth century was gradually speeding up to today’s rate of progress; its achievements, therefore, were equivalent to about twenty years of progress at the rate in 2000. We’ll make another twenty years of progress in just fourteen years (by 2014), and then do the same again in only seven years. To express this another way, we won’t experience one hundred years of technological advance in the twenty-first century; we will witness on the order of twenty thousand years of progress (again, when measured by today’s rate of progress), or about one thousand times greater than what was achieved in the twentieth century.”
― Ray Kurzweil, quote from The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“If we were magically shrunk and put into someone’s brain while she was thinking, we would see all the pumps, pistons, gears and levers working away, and we would be able to describe their workings completely, in mechanical terms, thereby completely describing the thought processes of the brain. But that description would nowhere contain any mention of thought! It would contain nothing but descriptions of pumps, pistons, levers! —G. W. LEIBNIZ (1646–1716)”
― Ray Kurzweil, quote from The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“Our human intelligence is based on computational processes that we are learning to understand. We will ultimately multiply our intellectual powers by applying and extending the methods of human intelligence using the vastly greater capacity of nonbiological computation. So to consider the ultimate limits of computation is really to ask: what is the destiny of our civilization?”
― Ray Kurzweil, quote from The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“(As Einstein said, “Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler.”)”
― Ray Kurzweil, quote from The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“If the mind were simple enough for us to understand, we would be too simple to understand it.”
― Ray Kurzweil, quote from The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“Fredkin [...] praat over een interessant kenmerk van computerprogramma's, waaronder cellulaire automaten: er is geen kortere route mogelijk naar wat de uitkomst wordt. Dit is het wezenlijke verschil tussen de 'analytische' benadering van de traditionele wiskunde, inclusief differentiële vergelijkingen, en de 'computer'-benadering met algoritmes. Je kunt een toekomstige toestand van een systeem voorspellen zonder alle tussenstappen te kennen als je de analytische methode gebruikt. Maar bij cellulaire automaten moet je alle tussenstappen doorrekenen om te weten hoe de uitkomst zal zijn: je kunt de toekomst niet voorspellen, behalve door de toekomst af te wachten. [...] Fredkin legt uit: 'je kunt het antwoord op een vraag niet sneller kennen dan wanneer je volgt wat er gebeurt.' [...] Fredkin gelooft dat het universum letterlijk een computer is en dat het gebruikt wordt door iets of iemand om een probleem op te lossen. Het klinkt als een grap met goed en slecht nieuws: het goede nieuws is dat onze levens een doel hebben; het slechte nieuws is dat onze levens het doel zijn van een of andere hacker ver weg die pi wil uitrekenen met een oneindig groot getal achter de komma.”
― Ray Kurzweil, quote from The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“These chunks represent patterns (such as faces) as well as specific knowledge. For example, a world-class chess master is estimated to have mastered about 100,000 board positions. Shakespeare used 29,000 words but close to 100,000 meanings of those words. Development of expert systems in medicine indicate that humans can master about 100,000 concepts in a domain. If we estimate that this “professional” knowledge represents as little as 1 percent of the overall pattern and knowledge store of a human, we arrive at an estimate of 107 chunks.”
― Ray Kurzweil, quote from The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“In accordance with the law of accelerating returns, paradigm shift (also called innovation) turns the S-curve of any specific paradigm into a continuing exponential. A new paradigm, such as three-dimensional circuits, takes over when the old paradigm approaches its natural limit, which has already happened at least four times in the history of computation. In such nonhuman species as apes, the mastery of a toolmaking or -using skill by each animal is characterized by an S-shaped learning curve that ends abruptly; human-created technology, in contrast, has followed an exponential pattern of growth and acceleration since its inception.”
― Ray Kurzweil, quote from The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success. —NIKOLA TESLA, 1896, INVENTOR OF ALTERNATING CURRENT”
― Ray Kurzweil, quote from The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“We come from goldfish, essentially, but that [doesn’t] mean we turned around and killed all the goldfish. Maybe [the AIs] will feed us once a week…. If you had a machine with a 10 to the 18th power IQ over humans, wouldn’t you want it to govern, or at least control your economy? —SETH SHOSTAK”
― Ray Kurzweil, quote from The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“Another error that prognosticators make is to consider the transformations that will result from a single trend in today’s world as if nothing else will change. A good example is the concern that radical life extension will result in overpopulation and the exhaustion of limited material resources to sustain human life, which ignores comparably radical wealth creation from nanotechnology and strong AI. For example, nanotechnology-based manufacturing devices in the 2020s will be capable of creating almost any physical product from inexpensive raw materials and information.”
― Ray Kurzweil, quote from 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, quote from The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“Although the Singularity has many faces, its most important implication is this: our technology will match and then vastly exceed the refinement and suppleness of what we regard as the best of human traits.”
― Ray Kurzweil, quote from The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

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Popular quotes

“Just like a man grieving because he has recently lost in his dreams some thing that he had never had in reality, or hoping that tomorrow he would dream that he found it again. That is how mathematics is created; it has its fatal flaw.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, quote from Invitation to a Beheading

“Antony:
O, whither hast thou led me, Egypt? See
How I convey my shame out of thine eyes
By looking back what I have left behind
'Stroyed in dishonour.

Cleopatra:
O my lord, my lord,
Forgive my fearful sails! I little thought
You would have followed.

Antony:
Egypt, thou knew'st too well
My heart was to thy rudder tied by th' strings,
And thou shouldst tow me after. O'er my spirit
Thy full supremacy thou knew'st, and that
Thy beck might from the bidding of the gods
Command me.

Cleopatra:
O, my pardon!

Antony:
Now I must
To the young man send humble treaties, dodge
And palter in the shifts of lowness, who
With half the bulk o' th' world played as I pleased,
Making and marring fortunes. You did know
How much you were my conqueror, and that
My sword, made weak by my affection, would
Obey it on all cause.

Cleopatra:
Pardon, pardon!

Antony:
Fall not a tear, I say; one of them rates
All that is won and lost. Give me a kiss.
Even this repays me.
We sent our schoolmaster; is 'a come back?
Love, I am full of lead. Some wine
Within there, and our viands! Fortune knows
We scorn her most when she offers blows.”
― William Shakespeare, quote from Antony and Cleopatra

“He looked at Kevin again. Kevin didn't recognize him, but maybe some part of him remembered the boy he'd met so many years ago. Neil's past was locked in Kevin's memories. It was proof he existed, same as this game they both played. Kevin was proof Neil was real. Maybe Kevin was also the best chance Neil had at knowing when to leave again. If he lived, practiced, and played with Kevin, he'd know when Kevin started to get suspicious.”
― Nora Sakavic, quote from The Foxhole Court

“Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end. Before we get it we live in a continuous present, and imagine the future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain.”
― Tobias Wolff, quote from This Boy's Life

“It’s dark as a tomb in here,” she said, unable to see more than shadows. “Will you light the candles, please,” she asked, “assuming there are candles in here?”
“Aye, milady, right there, next to the bed.” His shadow crossed before her, and Elizabeth focused on a large, oddly shaped object that she supposed could be a bed, given its size.
“Will you light them, please?” she urged. “I-I can’t see a thing in here.”
“His lordship don’t like more’n one candle lit in the bedchambers,” the footman said. “He says it’s a waste of beeswax.”
Elizabeth blinked in the darkness, torn somewhere between laughter and tears at her plight. “Oh,” she said, nonplussed. The footman lit a small candle at the far end of the room and left, closing the door behind him. “Milady?” Berta whispered, peering through the dark, impenetrable gloom. “Where are you?”
“I’m over here,” Elizabeth replied, walking cautiously forward, her arms outstretched, her hands groping about for possible obstructions in her path as she headed for what she hoped was the outside wall of the bedchamber, where there was bound to be a window with draperies hiding its light.
“Where?” Berta asked in a frightened whisper, and Elizabeth could hear the maid’s teeth chattering halfway across the room.
“Here-on your left.”
Berta followed the sound of her mistress’s voice and let out a terrified gasp at the sight of the ghostlike figure moving eerily through the darkness, arms outstretched. “Raise your arm,” she said urgently, “so I’ll know ‘tis you.”
Elizabeth, knowing Berta’s timid nature, complied immediately. She raised her arm, which, while calming poor Berta, unfortunately caused Elizabeth to walk straight into a slender, fluted pillar with a marble bust upon it, and they both began to topple. “Good God!” Elizabeth burst out, wrapping her arms protectively around the pillar and the marble object upon it. “Berta!” she said urgently. “This is no time to be afraid of the dark. Help me, please. I’ve bumped into something-a bust and its stand, I think-and I daren’t let go of them until I can see how to set them upright. There are draperies over here, right in front of me. All you have to do is follow my voice and open them. Once we do, ‘twill be bright as day in here.”
“I’m coming, milady,” Berta said bravely, and Elizabeth breathed a sigh of relief. “I’ve found them!” Berta cried softly a few minutes later. “They’re heavy-velvet they are, with another panel behind them.” Berta pulled one heavy panel back across the wall, and then, with renewed urgency and vigor, she yanked back the other and turned around to survey the room.
“Light as last!” Elizabeth said with relief. Dazzling late-afternoon sunlight poured into the windows directly in front of her, blinding her momentarily. “That’s much better,” she said, blinking. Satisfied that the pillar was quite sturdy enough to stand without her aid, Elizabeth was about to place the bust back upon it, but Berta’s cry stopped her.
“Saints preserve us!”
With the fragile bust clutched protectively to her chest Elizabeth swung sharply around. There, spread out before her, furnished entirely in red and gold, was the most shocking room Elizabeth had ever beheld: Six enormous gold cupids seemed to hover in thin air above a gigantic bed clutching crimson velvet bed draperies in one pudgy fist and holding bows and arrows in the other; more cupids adorned the headboard. Elizabeth’s eyes widened, first in disbelief, and a moment later in mirth. “Berta,” she breathed on a smothered giggle, “will you look at this place!”
― Judith McNaught, quote from Almost Heaven

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