"A primary reason that evolution - of life-forms or technology - speeds up is that it builds on its own increasing order." (Ray Kurzweil, "The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence", 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." (Ray Kurzweil, "The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence", 1999)
"Neither noise nor information is predictable." (Ray Kurzweil, "The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence", 1999)
"Once a computer achieves human intelligence it will necessarily roar past it." (Ray Kurzweil, "The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence", 1999)
"Sometimes, a deeper order - a better fit to a purpose - is achieved through simplification rather than further increases in complexity." (Ray Kurzweil, "The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence", 1999)
"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)." (Ray Kurzweil, "The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence", 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." (Ray Kurzweil, "The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence", 1999)
"Order [...] is information that fits a purpose." (Ray Kurzweil, "The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence", 1999)
"A key aspect of a probabilistic fractal is that it enables the generation of a great deal of apparent complexity, including extensive varying detail, from a relatively small amount of design information. Biology uses this same principle. Genes supply the design information, but the detail in an organism is vastly greater than the genetic design information." (Ray Kurzweil, "The Singularity is Near", 2005)
"Although the Singularity has many faces, its most important implication is this: our technology will match and then vastly exceed the refinement and suppleness of what we regard as the best of human traits." (Ray Kurzweil, "The Singularity is Near", 2005)
"Evolution moves towards greater complexity, greater elegance, greater knowledge, greater intelligence, greater beauty, greater creativity, and greater levels of subtle attributes such as love. […] 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." (Ray Kurzweil, "The Singularity is Near", 2005)
"However, the law of accelerating returns pertains to evolution, which is not a closed system. It takes place amid great chaos and indeed depends on the disorder in its midst, from which it draws its options for diversity. And from these options, an evolutionary process continually prunes its choices to create ever greater order." (Ray Kurzweil, "The Singularity is Near", 2005)
"'Increasing complexity' on its own is not, however, the ultimate goal or end-product of these evolutionary processes. Evolution results in better answers, not necessarily more complicated ones. Sometimes a superior solution is a simpler one." (Ray Kurzweil, "The Singularity is Near", 2005)
"Machines can pool their resources, intelligence, and memories. Two machines—or one million machines - can join together to become one and then become separate again. Multiple machines can do both at the same time: become one and separate simultaneously. Humans call this falling in love, but our biological ability to do this is fleeting and unreliable." (Ray Kurzweil, "The Singularity is Near", 2005)
"Most long-range forecasts of what is technically feasible in future time periods dramatically underestimate the power of future developments because they are based on what I call the 'intuitive linear' view of history rather than the 'historical exponential'.” view'." (Ray Kurzweil, "The Singularity is Near", 2005)
"Order is information that fits a purpose. The measure of order is the measure of how well the information fits the purpose." (Ray Kurzweil, "The Singularity is Near", 2005)
"The first idea is that human progress is exponential (that is, it expands by repeatedly multiplying by a constant) rather than linear (that is, expanding by repeatedly adding a constant). Linear versus exponential: Linear growth is steady; exponential growth becomes explosive." (Ray Kurzweil, "The Singularity is Near", 2005)
"The Singularity will represent the culmination of the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that is still human but that transcends our biological roots. There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality. If you wonder what will remain unequivocally human in such a world, it’s simply this quality: ours is the species that inherently seeks to extend its physical and mental reach beyond current limitations." (Ray Kurzweil, "The Singularity is Near", 2005)
"[...] there are no hard problems, only problems that are hard to a certain level of intelligence." (Ray Kurzweil, "The Singularity is Near", 2005)
"When a machine manages to be simultaneously meaningful and surprising in the same rich way, it too compels a mentalistic interpretation. Of course, somewhere behind the scenes, there are programmers who, in principle, have a mechanical interpretation. But even for them, that interpretation loses its grip as the working program fills its memory with details too voluminous for them to grasp." (Ray Kurzweil, "The Singularity is Near", 2005)
"If understanding language and other phenomena through statistical analysis does not count as true understanding, then humans have no understanding either." (Ray Kurzweil, "How to Create a Mind", 2012)
"One view is that philosophy is a kind of halfway house for questions that have not yet yielded to the scientific method." (Ray Kurzweil, "How to Create a Mind", 2012)
"The story of evolution unfolds with increasing levels of abstraction." (Ray Kurzweil, "How to Create a Mind", 2012)
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