RAY KURZWEIL

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.

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.

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.

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

I do have to pick my priorities. Nobody can do everything.

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.

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.

By the 2030s, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will predominate.

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

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.

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.

I consider myself an inventor, entrepreneur, and author.

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.

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

Information defines your personality, your memories, your skills.

Life expectancy is a statistical phenomenon. You could still be hit by the proverbial bus tomorrow.

As order exponentially increases, time exponentially speeds up.

My mission at Google is to develop natural language understanding with a team and in collaboration with other researchers at Google.

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.

We are beginning to see intimations of this in the implantation of computer devices into the human body.

Aging is not one process. It's many different things going on that cause us to age. I have a program that at least slows down each of these different processes.

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.

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

I'm working on artificial intelligence. Actually, natural language understanding, which is to get computers to understand the meaning of documents.