Ray Kurzweil

“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.”

“What we spend our time on is probably the most important decision we make.”

“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.”

“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 You and I are walking around with outdated software running in our bodies, which evolved in a very different era.”

“As order exponentially increases, time exponentially speeds up.”

“By 2029, computers will have emotional intelligence and be convincing as people.”

“The telephone is virtual reality in that you can meet with someone as if you are together, at least for the auditory sense.”

“New technologies can be used for destructive purposes. The answer is to develop rapid-response systems for new dangers like a bioterrorist creating a new biological virus.”

“Even by common wisdom, there seem to be both people and objects in my dream that are outside myself, but clearly they were created in myself and are part of me, they are mental constructs in my own brain.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Doing real world projects is, I think, the best way to learn and also to engage the world and find out what the world is all about.”

“Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it.”

“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.”

“Once we have inexpensive energy, we can readily and inexpensively convert the vast amount of dirty and salinated water we have on the planet to usable water.”

“Our technology, our machines, is part of our humanity. We created them to extend ourselves, and that is what is unique about human beings.”

“The Blue Brain project expects to have a full human-scale simulation of the cerebral cortex by 2018. I think that's a little optimistic, actually, but I do make the case that by 2029 we will have very detailed models and simulations of all the different brain regions.”

“The story of evolution unfolds with increasing levels of abstraction.”

“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.”

“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.”