Raymond Kurzweil

1948– · American computer scientist, author, entrepreneur, futurist and inventor (born 1

Topics: complexity, artificial intelligence, creativity, history of computing

• I quickly realized that you had to have a good idea of the future if you were going to succeed as an inventor.

  — Raymond Kurzweil

• Order... is information that fits a purpose.

  — Raymond Kurzweil

• 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.

  — Raymond Kurzweil

• What's not fully realized is that Moore's Law was not the first paradigm to bring exponential growth to computers. We had electromechanical calculators, relay-based computers, vacuum tubes, and transistors. Every time one paradigm ran out of steam, another took over.

  — Raymond Kurzweil

• 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.

  — Raymond Kurzweil

• Once a computer achieves human intelligence it will necessarily roar past it.

  — Raymond Kurzweil

• Sometimes, a deeper order—a better fit to a purpose—is achieved through simplification rather than further increases in complexity.

  — Raymond Kurzweil

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

  — Raymond Kurzweil

• My own field, pattern recognition... is the fundamental capability of the human brain. We can't think fast enough to logically analyze situations quickly, so we rely on our powers of pattern recognition.

  — Raymond Kurzweil

• The Law of Accelerating Returns: As order exponentially increases, time exponentially speeds up (that is, the time interval between salient events grows shorter as time passes). The Law... applies specifically to evolutionary processes.

  — Raymond Kurzweil

• 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.

  — Raymond Kurzweil

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

  — Raymond Kurzweil

• As intelligence saturates the matter and energy available to it, it turns dumb matter into smart matter.

  — Raymond Kurzweil

• 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.

  — Raymond Kurzweil