Ray Kurzweil Quotes
There are downsides to every technology. Fire kept us warm, but also burned down our villages.
Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Viking, 2005.
There is an opposite school of thought which argues that because technology develops so fast, by the time you legislate about it of you understand it, it is too late to prevent major problems and abuses which can become institutionalized. Instead it is argued, legislate rapidly BEFORE you understand all the consequences and then repeal and revise very frequently as the technology develops. This school argues that Schmidt’s view is tantamount to not legislating at all as it will ALWAYS be too late if you wait till you understand the consequences.
See {626813} for another quotation on this point.
He made this quotation in a discussion about nuclear weapons, but the principle is valid for many areas from the Internet to pharmaceuticals. In the nuclear weapons case there have been a number of accidents – including fatal ones – over the years and on several occasions a nuclear weapon came close to detonating near populated areas. In one case, radiation damage from a crash of a nuclear weapons equipped bomber have made an area in Spain unusable for years into the future.
Referring to the dual purposes of good and harm to which physics are applied.
Raymond Kurzweil is an American inventor and futurist. He is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He has written books on health, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism. Kurzweil is a public advocate for the futurist and transhumanist movements and gives public talks to share his optimistic outlook on life extension technologies and the future of nanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology.
