Before the next century is over, human beings will no longer be the most intelligent of capable type of entity on the planet.
The primary political and philosophical issue of the next century will be the definition of who we are.
Once a computer achieves human intelligence it will necessarily roar past it.
The Law of Time and Chaos: In a process, the time interval between salient events (that is, events that change the nature of the process, or significantly affect the future of the process) expands of contracts along with the amount of chaos.
The Law of Accelerating Returns: As order exponentially increases, time exponentially speeds up (that is, the time interval between salient events grows shorter as time passes). The Law... applies specifically to evolutionary processes.
Neither noise nor information is predictable.
Order is information that fits a purpose.
Sometimes, a deeper order—a better fit to a purpose—is achieved through simplification rather than further increases in complexity.
A primary reason that evolution—of life-forms or technology—speeds up is that it builds on its own increasing order.
I quickly realized that you had to have a good idea of the future if you were going to succeed as an inventor.
This interest in trends took on a life of its own, and I began to project some of them using what I call the Law of Accelerating Returns.
The twentieth century was like twenty years' worth of change at today's rate of change.
The ethical debates are like stones in a stream. The water runs around them.
You haven't seen any biological technologies held up for one week by any of these debates.
We use one stage of technology to create the next stage, which is why technology accelerates, why it grows in power.
To this day I remain convinced of this basic philosophy: no matter what quandries we face... there is an idea that can enable us to prevail.
This... was the religion that I was raised with: veneration for human creativity and the power of ideas.
The power of ideas to transform the world is itself accelerating.
Information defines your personality, your memories, your skills.
A lot of movies about artificial intelligence envision that AI's will be very intelligent but missing some key emotional qualities of humans and therefore turn out to be very dangerous.
Our intuition about the future is linear. But the reality of information technology is exponential, and that makes a profound difference. If I take 30 steps linearly, I get to 30. If I take 30 steps exponentially, I get to a billion.
No matter what problem you encounter, whether it's a grand challenge for humanity or a personal problem of your own, there's an idea out there that can overcome it. And you can find that idea.
Artificial intelligence will reach human levels by around 2029. Follow that out further to, say, 2045, we will have multiplied the intelligence, the human biological machine intelligence of our civilization a billion-fold.
Science fiction is the great opportunity to speculate on what could happen. It does give me, as a futurist, scenarios.
If you write a blog post, you've got something to say; you're not just creating words and synonyms. We'd like the computers to actually pick up on that semantic meaning.
Life expectancy is a statistical phenomenon. You could still be hit by the proverbial bus tomorrow.
Biology is a software process. Our bodies are made up of trillions of cells, each governed by this process. You and I are walking around with outdated software running in our bodies, which evolved in a very different era.
Information defines your personality, your memories, your skills.
I'm working on artificial intelligence. Actually, natural language understanding, which is to get computers to understand the meaning of documents.
Top 10
When you talk to a human in 2035, you'll be talking to someone that's a combination of biological and non-biological intelligence.
By the time we get to the 2040s, we'll be able to multiply human intelligence a billionfold. That will be a profound change that's singular in nature. Computers are going to keep getting smaller and smaller. Ultimately, they will go inside our bodies and brains and make us healthier, make us smarter.
By 2029, computers will have emotional intelligence and be convincing as people.
What we spend our time on is probably the most important decision we make.
Our technology, our machines, is part of our humanity. We created them to extend ourselves, and that is what is unique about human beings.
I do have to pick my priorities. Nobody can do everything.
The telephone is virtual reality in that you can meet with someone as if you are together, at least for the auditory sense.
People say we're running out of energy. That's only true if we stick with these old 19th century technologies. We are awash in energy from the sunlight.
Supercomputers will achieve one human brain capacity by 2010, and personal computers will do so by about 2020.
If we look at the life cycle of technologies, we see an early period of over-enthusiasm, then a 'bust' when disillusionment sets in, followed by the real revolution.
Sometimes people talk about conflict between humans and machines, and you can see that in a lot of science fiction. But the machines we're creating are not some invasion from Mars. We create these tools to expand our own reach.
All different forms of human expression, art, science, are going to become expanded, by expanding our intelligence.
By the 2030s, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will predominate.
I consider myself an inventor, entrepreneur, and author.
A successful person isn't necessarily better than her less successful peers at solving problems; her pattern-recognition facilities have just learned what problems are worth solving.
I'm an inventor. I became interested in long-term trends because an invention has to make sense in the world in which it is finished, not the world in which it is started.
The story of evolution unfolds with increasing levels of abstraction.
We are a pattern that changes slowly but has stability and continuity, even though the stuff constituting the pattern changes quickly