The Singularity Is Nearer Quotes

“A key capability in the 2030s will be to connect the upper ranges of our neocortices to the cloud, which will directly extend our thinking. In this way, rather than AI being a competitor, it will become an extension of ourselves. By the time this happens, the nonbiological portions”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

“A 2019 study showed that a neural net analyzing natural-language clinical metrics was able to diagnose pediatric diseases better than eight junior physicians exposed to the same data—and outperformed all twenty human doctors in some areas.”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

“But by far the most important application of AI to medicine in 2020 was the key role it played in designing safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines in record time. On January 11, 2020, Chinese authorities released the virus’s genetic sequence.[11] Moderna scientists got to work with powerful machine-learning tools that analyzed what vaccine would work best against it, and just two days later they had created the sequence for its mRNA vaccine.[12] On February 7 the first clinical batch was produced. After preliminary testing, it was sent to the National Institutes of Health on February 24. And on March 16—just sixty-three days after sequence selection—the first dose went into a trial participant’s arm. Before the pandemic, vaccines typically took five to ten years to develop. Achieving this breakthrough so quickly surely saved millions of lives.”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

“Suppose you are in front of a firing squad, and they all miss. You could say, ‘Well, if they hadn’t all missed, I wouldn’t be here to worry about it.”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

“When a fly settles upon the blossom, the petals close upon it and hold it fast till the plant has absorbed the insect into its system; but they will close on nothing but what is good to eat; of a drop of rain or a piece of stick they will take no notice. Curious! that so unconscious a thing should have such a keen eye to its own interest. If this is unconsciousness, where is the use of consciousness?[1]”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

“An estimated 42,915 people died in traffic accidents on US roads in 2021. While there is ongoing debate about how much of this should be attributed to human error, it is clear that the overwhelming majority of crashes have human error as a key component—likely somewhere between 90 and 99 percent. Autonomous vehicles controlled by capable enough AI could eliminate almost all of these.”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

“cada vez más a la singularidad, esto es, a la creación de un ser superior modificado por la ingeniería genética, alimentado y auspiciado por la IA e interconectado con otros cerebros.”
― Ray Kurzweil, La singularidad está más cerca: Cuando nos fusionamos con la IA (Deusto)

“Another goal of work is to give purpose and meaning to life. If your job consists of laying bricks, that labor provides two sorts of meaning. Most obviously, your wages enable you to provide for your loved ones and care for them—an important facet of identity. But you’re also building lasting structures that contribute to the public good. You’re literally contributing to something larger than yourself. Some of the most fulfilling jobs, like those in the arts and academia, additionally provide the opportunity to be creative and generate new knowledge.”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

“Before the release of the iPhone in 2007, there was no app economy to speak of. In 2008 there were fewer than 100,000 iOS apps available; this had rocketed up to around 4.5 million by 2017.[126] On Android, the growth was just as dramatic. In December 2009, there were around 16,000 mobile apps available in the Google Play Store.[127] As of March 2023, there were 2.6 million.[128] That is a more than 160-fold increase in thirteen years.”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

“other words, in order for us to even be considering this question, we must inhabit a fine-tuned universe—if it had been otherwise, we wouldn’t be conscious and able to reflect on that fact. This is known as the anthropic principle. Some scientists believe that such an explanation is adequate. But if we believe that reality exists independently of ourselves as observers, this cannot be fully satisfying. Martin Rees considers a compelling question we might still ask. As he puts it, “Suppose you are in front of a firing squad, and they all miss. You could say, ‘Well, if they hadn’t all missed, I wouldn’t be here to worry about it.’ But it is still something surprising, something that can’t be easily explained. I think there is something there that needs explaining.”[77]”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

“In addition, that the universe came into being with an ability to evolve complex information at all is arguably even more unlikely. Our understanding of physics and cosmology demonstrates that if the values in the laws of physics had been only slightly different, the universe would not have been able to support life.[55] Put another way, of all the configurations that the universe theoretically could have had, only the very tiniest fraction would have allowed us to exist.”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

“And so, viewed through the lens of panprotopsychism, the emergent processes in our brains aren’t controlling us; they are us. We arise from deeper forces, but our choices cannot be known in advance—so we have free will as long as the processes that give rise to our consciousness are able to be expressed through our actions in the world.[”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

“For example, actors can now convey what their character is thinking only through their words and external physical expressions. But we might eventually have art that puts a character’s raw, disorganized, nonverbal thoughts—in all their inexpressible beauty and complexity—directly into our brains. This is the cultural richness that brain–computer interfaces will enable for us.”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

“The result will be the invention of means of expression vastly richer than the art and technology that’s possible today—more profound than we can currently imagine.”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

“Remember what happened two million years ago, the last time we gained more neocortex? We became humans. When we can access additional neocortex in the cloud, the leap in cognitive abstraction will likely be similar.”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

“According to scientists’ best estimates, about 2.9 billion years then passed between the first life on earth and the first multicellular life.[33] Another 500 million years passed before animals walked on land, and 200 million more before the first mammals appeared.[34] Focusing on the brain, the length of time between the first development of primitive nerve nets and the emergence of the earliest centralized, tripartite brain was somewhere over 100 million years.[35] The first basic neocortex didn’t appear for another 350 million to 400 million years, and it took another 200 million years or so for the modern human brain to evolve.[36]”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

“This is a powerful way to tackle complex problems, but it is a double-edged sword. Connectionist AI is prone to becoming a “black box”—capable of spitting out the correct answer, but unable to explain how it found it.[24] This has the potential to become a major issue because people will want to be able to see the reasoning behind high-stakes decisions about things like medical treatment, law enforcement, epidemiology, or risk management.”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

“One of the key advantages of the connectionist approach is that it allows you to solve problems without understanding them.”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

“Likewise, such neurodegenerative diseases as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s involve subtle, complex processes that cause misfolded proteins to build up in the brain and inflict harm.[22] Because it’s impossible to study these effects thoroughly in a living brain, research has been extremely slow and difficult. With AI simulations we’ll be able to understand their root causes and treat patients effectively long before they become debilitated.”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

“accessible, we are integrating these capabilities ever more closely with our natural biological intelligence. Eventually nanotechnology will enable these trends to culminate in directly expanding our brains with layers of virtual neurons in the cloud. In this way we will merge with AI and augment ourselves with millions of times the computational power that our biology gave us. This will expand our intelligence and consciousness so profoundly that it’s difficult to comprehend. This event is what I mean by the Singularity.”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

“Can machines think?”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

“Moravec’s paradox.84 In short, mental tasks that seem hard to humans—like square-rooting large numbers and remembering large amounts of information—are comparatively easy for computers. Conversely, mental tasks that are effortless to humans—like recognizing a face or keeping one’s balance while walking—are much more difficult for”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

“This leads us to a third case, which is actually not a hypothetical. Every day our own cells undergo a very rapid replacement process. While neurons generally persist, about half of their mitochondria turn over in a month;[46] a neurotubule has a half-life of several days;[47] the proteins that add energy to the synapses are replenished every two to five days;[48] the NMDA receptors in synapses are replaced in a matter of hours;[49] and the actin filaments in the dendrites last for about forty seconds.[50] Our brains are thus almost completely replaced within a few months,”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

“So the neocortex was essentially waiting for a calamity in order to take over the world. That crisis, which we now call the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, occurred 65 million years ago, 135 million years after the neocortex came into existence. Due to an asteroid impact and possibly also volcanic activity, the environment all across the earth changed suddenly, resulting in about 75 percent of all animal and plant species, including the dinosaurs, going extinct. (While the creatures we commonly know as dinosaurs went extinct during this event, some scientists consider birds to be a surviving branch of dinosaurs.)[50]”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

“In 1950, the British mathematician Alan Turing (1912–1954) published an article in Mind titled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.”[1] In it, Turing asked one of the most profound questions in the history of science: “Can machines think?” While the idea of thinking machines dates back at least as far as the bronze automaton Talos in Greek myth,[2] Turing’s breakthrough was boiling the concept down to something empirically testable. He proposed using the “imitation game”—which we now know as the Turing test—to determine whether a machine’s computation was able to perform the same cognitive tasks that our brains can. In this test, human judges interview both the AI and human foils using instant messaging without seeing whom they are talking to. The judges then pose questions about any subject matter or situation they wish. If after a certain period of time the judges are unable to tell which was the AI responder and which were the humans, then the AI is said to have passed the test.”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

“learning is currently re-creating the powers of the neocortex, we can assess what AI still needs to achieve to reach human levels, and how we will know when it has. Finally, we’ll turn to how, aided by superhuman AI, we will engineer brain–computer interfaces that vastly expand our neocortices with layers of virtual neurons. This will unlock entirely new modes of thought and ultimately expand our intelligence millions-fold: this is the Singularity.”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

“The question of how identity relates to replacing an object’s parts gradually over time dates back to a thought experiment first posed about 2,500 years ago, called the Ship of Theseus.”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

“As of 2023, there are five nations known to have a full “triad” of nuclear weapons (intercontinental ballistic missiles, air-delivery bombs, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles): the United States (5,244 warheads), Russia (5,889), China (410), Pakistan (170), and India (164).[8] Three other nations are known to have a more limited form of delivery system: France (290), the United Kingdom (225), and North Korea (around 30).”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

“Humanity currently has roughly 12,700 nuclear warheads, around 9,440 of which are active and could be used in a nuclear war.[3] The United States and Russia each maintain around 1,000 large warheads that could be launched with less than a half hour’s notice.[”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

“Recall my estimate that the computation inside the human brain (at the level of neurons) is on the order of 1014 per second. As of 2023, $1,000 of computing power could perform up to 130 trillion computations per second.[130] Based on the 2000–2023 trend, by 2053 about $1,000 of computing power (in 2023 dollars) will be enough to perform around 7 million times as many computations per second as the unenhanced human brain.[131]”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI