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Ray Kurzweil Quotes (1948-)
Author, Director, Inventor
About Ray Kurzweil
Ray Kurzweil (born February 12, 1948) is an American author, computer scientist, inventor, futurist, and a director of engineering at Google. He is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He is a public advocate for the futurist and transhumanist movements.
Best Ray Kurzweil Quotes
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Explore our curated collection of the most famous and impactful Ray Kurzweil quotes.
“Order... is information that fits a purpose.”
“The power of ideas to transform the world is itself accelerating.”
“Once a computer achieves human intelligence it will necessarily roar past it.”
“Consciousness becomes a matter of philosophical debate; it's not scientifically reliable.”
“The primary political and philosophical issue of the next century will be the definition of who we are.”
“This... was the religion that I was raised with: veneration for human creativity and the power of ideas.”
“As intelligence saturates the matter and energy available to it, it turns dumb matter into smart matter.”
“I quickly realized that you had to have a good idea of the future if you were going to succeed as an inventor.”
“Ultimately, the entire universe will become saturated with our intelligence. This is the destiny of the universe.”
“We use one stage of technology to create the next stage, which is why technology accelerates, why it grows in power.”
“I will be able to talk to this re-creation. Ultimately, it will be so realistic it will be like talking to my father.”
“Before the next century is over, human beings will no longer be the most intelligent of capable type of entity on the planet.”
“A primary reason that evolution—of life-forms or technology—speeds up is that it builds on its own increasing order.”
“Sometimes, a deeper order—a better fit to a purpose—is achieved through simplification rather than further increases in complexity.”
“The basic feasibility of communicating in both directions between electronic devices and biological neurons has already been demonstrated.”
“To this day I remain convinced of this basic philosophy: no matter what quandries we face... there is an idea that can enable us to prevail.”
“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.”
“Creating an avatar of this sort is one way of embodying that information in a way that human beings can interact with. It is inherently human to transcend limitations.”
“I think all human beings are and should be fearful [of death, but realizing that death is a real tragedy.”
“If you use conventional data compression on the [human brain's] genome, you get about 23 million bytes (a small fraction of the size of Microsoft Word), which is a level of complexity we can handle.”
“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 Terminator' is not an impossibility. I think that symbolizes the downside of artificial intelligence ... but technology has a big downside in general. There is a bigger downside to not pursuing it.”
Ray Kurzweil Quotes by Topic
Find exactly what you are looking for by browsing this categorized list of Ray Kurzweil quotes by topic.
Ray Kurzweil on Consciousness
“Consciousness becomes a matter of philosophical debate; it's not scientifically reliable.”
Ray Kurzweil on Artificial intelligence
“My timeline is computers will be at human levels, such as you can have a human relationship with them, 15 years from now.
When I say about human levels, I'm talking about emotional intelligence. The ability to tell a joke, to be funny, to be romantic, to be loving, to be sexy, that is the cutting edge of human intelligence, that is not a sideshow.”
Ray Kurzweil on Transhumanism
“Evolution moves towards greater complexity, greater elegance, greater knowledge, greater intelligence, greater beauty, greater creativity, and greater levels of subtle attributes such as love. In every monotheistic tradition God is likewise described as all of these qualities, only without limitation: infinite knowledge, infinite intelligence, infinite beauty, infinite creativity, infinite love, and so on. Of course, even the accelerating growth of evolution never achieves an infinite level, but as it explodes exponentially it certainly moves rapidly in that direction. So evolution moves inexorably towards this conception of God, although never quite reaching this ideal. We can regard, therefore, the freeing of our thinking from the severe limitations of its biological form to be an essentially spiritual undertaking.”
About Ray Kurzweil
Ray Kurzweil (born February 12, 1948) is an American author, computer scientist, inventor, futurist, and a director of engineering at Google. He is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He is a public advocate for the futurist and transhumanist movements.