Ray Kurzweil Quotes

Computers get better faster than anything else ever.

I'm a physicist, and we have something called Moore's Law, which says computer power doubles every 18 months. So every Christmas, we more or less assume that our toys and appliances are more or less twice as powerful as the previous Christmas.

Nanotechnology will let us build computers that are incredibly powerful. We'll have more power in the volume of a sugar cube than exists in the entire world today.

Today, your cell phone has more computer power than all of NASA back in 1969, when it placed two astronauts on the moon. Video games, which consume enormous amounts of computer power to simulate 3-D situations, use more computer power than mainframe computers of the previous decade. The Sony PlayStation of today, which costs $300, has the power of a military supercomputer of 1997, which cost millions of dollars.

The way Moore's Law occurs in computing is really unprecedented in other walks of life. If the Boeing 747 obeyed Moore's Law, it would travel a million miles an hour, it would be shrunken down in size, and a trip to New York would cost about five dollars. Those enormous changes just aren't part of our everyday experience.

It's Moore's Law, everything will be obsolete in 10 years - I'll be obsolete in 10 years!

Computer power grows according to Moore's law, as does the sophistication of handheld devices.

Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.

A big part of the success of Microsoft was that every year, the chips our software ran on got faster and cheaper. They doubled in capability every 18 months under Moore's law.

If it weren't for Moore's law changing the playing field continuously, I would have been long gone. The rapid pace of hardware evolution still keeps things fresh for me.

So what used to fit in a building now fits in your pocket, what fits in your pocket now will fit inside a blood cell in 25 years.

Computers get better, faster than anything else ever. A child's PlayStation today is more powerful than a military supercomputer from 1996. But our brains are wired for a linear world. As a result, exponential trends take us by surprise. I used to teach my students that there are some things, you know, computers just aren't good at like driving a car through traffic.

I saw the logarithmic growth of computer power.

If the automobile had followed the same development as the computer, a Rolls Royce would today cost $100 and get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year killing everyone inside.

Computers get better faster than anything else ever. A child's PlayStation today is more powerful than a military supercomputer from 1996.

Computers double their performance every month.

Supercomputers will achieve one human brain capacity by 2010, and personal computers will do so by about 2020.

With electronics, they just get smaller and smaller.

The pace of digitizing life has been increasing exponentially.

Because of the nature of Moore's law, anything that an extremely clever graphics programmer can do at one point can be replicated by a merely competent programmer some number of years later.

It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years.

Every two years, to keep Moore's Law happening, you have to invent... That's where I grew up.

The accumulated knowledge of materials, computing, electromagnetism, product design, and all the rest that we've learned over the last several centuries converts a few ounces of raw materials worth mere pennies into a device with more computing power than the entire planet possessed fifty years ago.

Every one of today's smartphones has thousands of times more processing power than the computers that guided astronauts to the moon.

A typical smart phone has more computing power than Apollo 11 when it landed a man on the moon.