Quotes from the book "The singularity is near" - Ray Kurzweil
This is very interesting book from Ray Kurzweil , A futurist, inventor and author. Its fascinating to imagine the role of GNR(Genetics, Nano and Robot AI) in the future. You can refer his 6 Epochs of evolution here.
When scientists become a million times more intelligent and operate a million times faster, an hour would result in a century of progress (in today's terms).
There are no hard problems, only problems that are hard to certain level of intelligence.
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
There are three great philosophical questions. What is life? what is consciousness and thinking and memory and all that ? and how does the universe work ?
The good news is that our lives have purpose; the bad news is that their purpose is to help some remote hacker estimate pi to nine jillion decimal places.
The ultimate self-replicating molecule from biology is, of course, DNA.
I set the date for the singularity representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability - as 2045.
Older memories persist but nonetheless appear to fade, because their resolution has diminished.
Elaine Rich defines AI as "the study of how to make computers do things at which, at the moment, people are better."
If you understand something in only one way, then you don't really understand it at all. This is because, if something goes wrong, you get stuck with a thought that just sits in your mind with nowhere to go.
A century ago 30 percent of the US workforce was employed on farms, with another 30 percent in factories. Bothe of these figure are now under 3 percent.
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
We have hundreds of megabits of information flowing through our senses every second, the bulk of which is intelligently discarded.
I am principally a pattern that persists in time. I am evolving pattern, and I can influence the course of the evolution of my pattern.
90% of cells in your body don't have your DNA.
We are the only people who assume that we have ascended from apes. Everybody else takes it for granted that they are descended from gods.
Rational fear could lead to irrational solutions.
The major advances in civilization all but wreck the civilizations in which they occur.
There is a well-developed body of mathematics devoted to modeling and simulating chaotic systems, which are used to understand phenomena such as weather patterns and financial markets, that is also applicable to the brain.
Imperfection is an inherent feature of any complex process.
Early-adoption versions that do not work very well and that are unaffordable except by the elite. Subsequently the technology works a bit better and becomes merely expensive. Then it works quite well and becomes inexpensive.
Future machines will be biologically inspired.
The brains and experiences of different people are clearly not the same.
How can we with our brains each limited to 10 to the power of 19 CPS imagine what our future civilization in 2099 with its 10 to the power of 60 CPS will be capable of thinking and doing.
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