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
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.
Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it.
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.
When I was a student at MIT, we all shared one computer and it took up a whole building. The computer in your cell phone today is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful. What now fits in your pocket 25 years from now will fit into a blood cell and will again be millions of times more cost effective.
Evolution is a process of creating patterns of increasing order....I believe that it's the evolution of patterns that constitutes the ultimate story of our world. Evolution works through indirection: each stage or epoch uses the information-processing methods of the previous epoch to create the next.
What we found was that rather than being haphazardly arranged or independent pathways, we find that all of the pathways of the brain taken together fit together in a single exceedingly simple structure. They basically look like a cube. They basically run in three perpendicular directions, and in each one of those three directions the pathways are highly parallel to each other and arranged in arrays. So, instead of independent spaghettis, we see that the connectivity of the brain is, in a sense, a single coherent structure.
If we could convert 0.03 percent of the sunlight that falls on the earth into energy, we could meet all of our projected needs for 2030.
Doing real world projects is, I think, the best way to learn and also to engage the world and find out what the world is all about.
Nature, and the natural human condition, generates tremendous suffering. We have the means to overcome that, and we should deploy it.
We're democratizing the tools of creativity.
There are downsides to every technology. Fire kept us warm, but also burned down our villages.
It is doubling now every two years. Doubling every two years means multiplying by 1,000 in 20 years. At that rate we'll meet 100 percent of our energy needs in 20 years.
The story of evolution unfolds with increasing levels of abstraction.
We appear to be programmed with the idea that there are 'things' outside of our self, and some are conscious, and some are not.