Ray 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.

2005

My spiritual education...took place at a Unitarian Church...The theme was "many paths to the truth." …even the inconsistencies were illuminating. It became apparent to me that the basic truths were profound enough to transcend apparent contradictions.

2005

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.

2005

The power of ideas to transform the world is itself accelerating.

2005

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.

2003

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

2003

This interest in trends took on a life of its own, and I began to project some of them using what I call the Law of Accelerating Returns.

2003

The twentieth century was like twenty years' worth of change at today's rate of change.

2003

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.

2003

Before the next century is over, human beings will no longer be the most intelligent of capable type of entity on the planet.

1999

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

1999

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.

1999

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

1999

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. And that is what we will experience as we enter the twenty-first century.

1999

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.

Ray Kurzweil: The Library Journal, The virtual book revisited