James Howard Kunstler Quotes

By the time of the Singularity, there won't be a distinction between humans and technology. This is not because humans will have become what we think of as machines today, but rather machines will have progressed to be like humans and beyond. Technology will be the metaphorical opposable thumb that enables our next step in evolution.

Instead of using technology or wearing technology constantly, we will start becoming technology.

We will continue to live in a form in which we become cyborg. Either we download our information to a machine or we incorporate so many machine parts that we don't know where we end and the machine begins.

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

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.

Although technology is proceeding at a dizzying pace, I believe that the human mind will always have control of itself. And since the human mind has a degree of infinity and imagination unlikely to be matched by a machine for a very, very long time, I don't think that we will become the machines of the machines.

Human beings are tool-making animals. Since the prehistoric era, we have created and used a wide variety of objects. But now a significant change is about to occur. In the near future, we will simply become another object that can be monitored, tracked and controlled within a vast machine.

Machine intelligence of a human nature could be a century away, and immortality is at least a millennium away, if not unattainable altogether.

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

The real world is far too complex and unpredictable to make something like the idea of humanity controlling its own evolution or engineering itself - well, I wouldn't say impossible but it should be approached with a degree of caution.

Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times.

'Skinned' tells the story of Lia, a young girl who has it all - until she nearly dies and has her consciousness transferred into a robot body.

If the computer-guided robots turn out to be our superiors in every respect, then will they not find that they can run the world better without the need of us at all? Humanity itself will then have become obsolete.

I titled the book 'Homo Deus' because we really are becoming gods in the most literal sense possible. We are acquiring abilities that have always been thought to be divine abilities - in particular, the ability to create life. And we can do with that whatever we want.

Having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus.

The song 'Paradigm' talks about nanobots - and how they can potentially be used to cure diseases and help you live forever. But how much of a human being would you be at that point? If you're 70 percent machine and 30 percent human, are you going to lose yourself?

'Altered Carbon' is one of the most seminal pieces of post-cyberpunk hard science fiction out there - a dark, complex noir story that challenges our ideas of what it means to be human when all information becomes encodable, including the human mind.

The notion of superhumans is using bioengineering and artificial intelligence to upgrade human abilities. If they use the power to change themselves, to change their own minds, their own desires, then we have no idea what they will want to do.

The danger of computers becoming like humans is not as great as the danger of humans becoming like computers.

‎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.

A Singularitarian is someone who understands the Singularity and has reflected on its meaning for his or her own life.

Although we will hate and fight the machines, we will be supplanted anyway, and rightly so, for the intelligent machines to which we will give birth may, better than we, carry on the striving toward the goal of understanding and using the Universe, climbing to heights we ourselves could never aspire to.

People's minds are polluted by these dark pictures of the future from Hollywood: "The Terminator," the Skynet, "The Matrix." It's world where there's no room for humans, or they have to fight against the machines. I think it's just a way, way, way, way in the future. Is it going to happen? I don't know. For me, these debates are not similar, but they resemble debates about how the sun will turn into a supernova in 4 to 5 billion years. Frankly, I don't care.

The computer is a mind machine. It doesn't have its own psychology, but in a way it presents itself as though it does.

We begin to not be human, as we've known it, any longer. But to be just creative minds and action, whereas right now we're confused minds and actions, and our environment mirrors that back to us.