Ray Kurzweil Quotes

I think a few hundred years from now we'll start having the 'posthuman' era of different species.

From the growth of the Internet through to the mapping of the human genome and our understanding of the human brain, the more we understand, the more there seems to be for us to explore.

The next evolutionary step is into the screen.

We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us - through our brains, our symbolic culture and our technology - that the explosion may proceed to the next stage and reverberate through deep space.

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence.

I want to see what technology's going to be like in a few hundred years, if the human race hasn't completely obliterated itself by then.

In the entire history of the human species, every tool we've invented has been to expand muscle power. All except one. The integrated circuit, the computer. That lets us use our brain power.

If you think about some of the things that are being talked about by thoughtful, intelligent scientists, you realize that in 100 years the human race won't even be recognizable.

Our grandkids will lead the lives of the gods of mythology. Zeus could think and move objects around. We'll have that power. Venus had a perfect, timeless body. We'll have that, too. Pegasus was a flying horse. We'll be able to modify life in the future.

I think we're going to move from a Homo sapiens into a Homo evolutis:... a hominid that takes direct and deliberate control over the evolution of his species, her species and other species.

When you talk to a human in 2035, you'll be talking to someone that's a combination of biological and non-biological intelligence.

My wish for humanity is to invent a way to communicate between us and whatever comes next. And in the end that we the creator of the sentient sapient and the created we have a symbiotic relationship.

We're the first technology-creating species. We use technology to extend our reach. We didn't stay in the caves, and we haven't stayed on the planet. To play jazz with our genomes and the universe might ultimately be what we're all about.

We should place priority on the development of safeguards against unwise, permanent alterations in the human gene pool. Now that we have become principle agents of evolution, it is crucially important to recognize that the pursuit of short-term goals through human modification can be dangerously inconsistent with the long-term best interests of the human species.

We are the product of 4.5 billion years of fortuitous, slow biological evolution. There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process has stopped. Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation.

With science, technology and globalization, man is changing the world faster than his evolution can keep up with the new dangers.

The advance of genetic engineering makes it quite conceivable that we will begin to design our own evolutionary progress.

One can say with reasonable confidence that the likelihood of something analogous to a human evolving is really pretty high.

We're going to merge with machines and become gods, but first, we've got to reduce the world population 90 percent.

We humans are not the end of evolution, so if we can make a machine that's as smart as a person, we can probably also make one that's much smarter. There's no point in making just another person. You want to make one that can do things we can't.

Writing genetic code like we do software will usher in a completely new way of living for all of us. When this happens, our society will be as fundamentally changed as we have seen from the invention of computers.

Homo sapiens, you and me, we are basically the same as people 10,000 years ago. The next revolution will change that.

We can't stop the development of smarter and smarter artificial intelligences. So our alternative is to make ourselves smarter so that we always stay one step ahead.

It seems as though our ability to change technology happens so quickly, and our ability to evolve as creatures is still very slow.

‎By 2100, our destiny is to become like the gods we once worshipped and feared. But our tools will not be magic wands and potions but the science of computers, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and most of all, the quantum theory.