44 Ray Kurzweil Quotes

Raymond Ray Kurzweil was born on February 12, 1948, and he grew up in New York City.

Kurzweil had wanted to become an inventor since the age of five. He followed his passion and obtained a Bachelor of Science in computer science and literature from the prestigious MIT.

In 1982 he launched the Kurzweil K250 music synthesizer, which could imitate the sounds of several orchestral instruments, including the grand piano. In December 2012, he became the director of engineering at Google. Kurzweil gives several public talks to share his optimistic outlook on nanotechnology, robotics, biotechnology, and other futuristic technologies.

"As order exponentially increases, time exponentially speeds up." - 'The Age Of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence'

"The purposeful destruction of information is the essence of intelligent work." - 'The Age Of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence'

"Life expectancy is a statistical phenomenon. You could still be hit by the proverbial bus tomorrow."

"The primary political and philosophical issue of the next century will be the definition of who we are."

"I do have to pick my priorities. Nobody can do everything."

"Neither noise nor information is predictable."

"I consider myself an inventor, entrepreneur, and author."

"Death is a great tragedy…a profound loss…I don’t accept it…I think people are kidding themselves when they say they are comfortable with death."

"Play is just another version of work."

"You create your brain from the input you get."

"Information defines your personality, your memories, your skills."

"Emotional intelligence is what humans are good at and that's not a sideshow. That's the cutting edge of human intelligence."

"If I take 30 steps linearly, I get to 30. If I take 30 steps exponentially, I get to a billion."

"I'm an inventor. I became interested in long-term trends because an invention has to make sense in the world in which it is finished, not the world in which it is started."

"People say we're running out of energy. That's only true if we stick with these old 19th-century technologies. We are awash in energy from the sunlight."

"Supercomputers will achieve one human brain capacity by 2010, and personal computers will do so by about 2020."

"I think, computers will match and exceed human intelligence in the ways we're now superior, like being funny, where we still have an edge."

"I'm working on artificial intelligence. Actually, natural language understanding, which is to get computers to understand the meaning of documents."

"By the 2030s, the non-biological portion of our intelligence will predominate."

"The ethical debates are like stones in a stream. The water runs around them. You haven't seen any biological technologies held up for one week by any of these debates."

"If we look at the life cycle of technologies, we see an early period of over-enthusiasm, then a 'bust' when disillusionment sets in, followed by the real revolution."

"Sometimes people talk about the conflict between humans and machines, and you can see that in a lot of science fiction."

"But the machines we're creating are not some invasion from Mars. We create these tools to expand our own reach."

"The telephone is virtual reality in that you can meet with someone as if you are together, at least for the auditory sense."

"Science fiction is a great opportunity to speculate on what could happen. It does give me, as a futurist, scenarios."

"Our intuition about the future is linear. But the reality of information technology is exponential, and that makes a profound difference."

"We use one stage of technology to create the next stage, which is why technology accelerates, why it grows in power."

"The Law of Time and Chaos: In a process, the time interval between salient events (that is, events that change the nature of the process, or significantly affect the future of the process) expands of contracts along with the amount of chaos."

"We live in a three-dimensional world, and our brains are organized in three dimensions, so we might as well compute in three dimensions."

"Right now, chips, even though they're very dense, are flat."

"The speed and density of computation have been doubling every three years (at the beginning of the twentieth century) to one year (at the end of the twentieth century), regardless of the type of hardware used."

"We had electromechanical calculators, relay-based computers, vacuum tubes, and transistors. Every time one paradigm ran out of steam, another took over."

"Biology is a software process. Our bodies are made up of trillions of cells, each governed by this process."

"You and I are walking around with outdated software running in our bodies, which evolved in a very different era."

"By 2029, computers will have emotional intelligence and be convincing as people."

"Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity- technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history."

"Even by common wisdom, there seem to be both people and objects in my dream that are outside myself, but clearly, they were created in myself and are part of me, they are mental constructs in my own brain."

"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."

"No matter what problem you encounter, whether it's a grand challenge for humanity or a personal problem of your own, there's an idea out there that can overcome it. And you can find that idea."

"A primary reason that evolution—of life-forms or technology—speeds up is that it builds on its own increasing order."

"It is in the nature of exponential growth that events develop extremely slowly for extremely long periods of time, but as one glides through the knee of the curve, events erupt at an increasingly furious pace."

"One of the advantages of being in the futurism business is that by the time your readers are able to find fault with your forecasts, it is too late for them to ask for their money back.'

"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."

"If you write a blog post, you've got something to say; you're not just creating words and synonyms. We'd like the computers to actually pick up on that semantic meaning."