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The intelligence we will create from the reverse-engineering of the brain will have access to its own source code and will be able to rapidly improve itself in an accelerating iterative design cycle. Although there is considerable plasticity in the biological human brain, as we have seen, it does have a relatively fixed architecture, which cannot be significantly modified, as well as a limited capacity. We are unable to increase its 300 million pattern recognizers to, say, 400 million unless we do so nonbiologically. Once we can achieve that, there will be no reason to stop at a particular level of capability. We can go on to make it a billion pattern recognizers, or a trillion.Ray Kurzweil
2
The pattern recognition theory of mind that I articulate in this book is based on a different fundamental unit: not the neuron itself, but rather an assembly of neurons, which I estimate to number around a hundred. The wiring and synaptic strengths within each unit are relatively stable and determined genetically–that is the organization within each pattern recognition module is determined by genetic design. Learning takes place in the creation of connections between these units, not within them, and probably in the synaptic strengths of the interunit connections.Ray Kurzweil
3
The purposeful destruction of information is the essence of intelligent work.Ray Kurzweil
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Play is just another version of workRay Kurzweil
5
The story of evolution unfolds with increasing levels of abstraction.Ray Kurzweil
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The evolution of animal behavior does constitute a learning process, but it is learning by the species, not by the individual, and the fruits of this learning process are encoded in DNA.Ray Kurzweil
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Recall the metaphor I used in chapter 4 relating the random movements of molecules in a gas to the random movements of evolutionary change. Molecules in a gas move randomly with no apparent sense of direction. Despite this, virtually every molecule in a gas in a beaker, given sufficient time, will leave the beaker. I noted that this provides a perspective on an important question concerning the evolution of intelligence. Like molecules in a gas, evolutionary changes also move every which way with no apparent direction. Yet we nonetheless see a movement toward greater complexity and greater intelligence, indeed to evolution’s supreme achievement of evolving a neocortex capable of hierarchical thinking. So we are able to gain an insightinto how an apparently purposeless and directionless process can achieve an apparently purposeful result in one field (biological evolution) by looking at another field (thermodynamics). .Ray Kurzweil
8
Take death for example. A great deal of our effort goes into avoiding it. We make extraordinary efforts to delay it, and often consider its intrusion a tragic event. Yet we’d find it hard to live without it. Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it.Ray Kurzweil
9
A primary reason that people believe that life is getting worse is because our information about the problems of the world has steadily improved. If there is a battle today somewhere on the planet, we experience it almost as if we were there. DuringWorld War II, tens of thousands of people might perish in a battle, and if the public could see it at all it was in a grainy newsreel in a movie theater weeks later. During World War I a small elite could read about the progress of the conflict in the newspaper(without pictures). During the nineteenth century there was almost no access to news in a timely fashion for anyone.Ray Kurzweil
10
We cannot rely on trial-and-error approaches to deal with existential risks… We need to vastly increase our investment in developing specific defensive technologies… We are at the critical stage today for biotechnology, and we will reach the stage where we need to directly implement defensive technologies for nanotechnology during the late teen years of this century… A self-replicating pathogen, whether biological or nanotechnology based, could destroy our civilization in a matter of days or weeks.Ray Kurzweil
11
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.Ray Kurzweil
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By 2029, computers will have emotional intelligence and be convincing as people.Ray Kurzweil
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Supercomputers will achieve one human brain capacity by 2010, and personal computers will do so by about 2020.Ray Kurzweil
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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.Ray Kurzweil
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I'm working on artificial intelligence. Actually, natural language understanding, which is to get computers to understand the meaning of documents.Ray Kurzweil
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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.Ray Kurzweil
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Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it.Ray Kurzweil
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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.Ray Kurzweil
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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.Ray Kurzweil
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When you talk to a human in 2035, you'll be talking to someone that's a combination of biological and non-biological intelligence.Ray Kurzweil
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All different forms of human expression, art, science, are going to become expanded, by expanding our intelligence.Ray Kurzweil
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By the 2030s, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will predominate.Ray Kurzweil
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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.Ray Kurzweil
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Our technology, our machines, is part of our humanity. We created them to extend ourselves, and that is what is unique about human beings.Ray Kurzweil
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I think we are evolving rapidly into one world culture. It's certainly one world economy. With billions of people online, I think we'll appreciate the wisdom in many different traditions as we learn more about them. People were very isolated and didn't know anything about other religions 100 years ago.Ray Kurzweil