Ray Kurzweil Quotes

Robots may gradually attain a degree of 'self-awareness' and consciousness of their own.

It seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers… They would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits. At some stage therefore, we should have to expect the machines to take control.

The self driving car is not self-aware. It's just driving; it's not thinking.

I still find it hard to understand that anyone could argue that you can't have machines that exhibit consciousness.

The purest case of an intelligence explosion would be an Artificial Intelligence rewriting its own source code. The key idea is that if you can improve intelligence even a little, the process accelerates. It's a tipping point. Like trying to balance a pen on one end - as soon as it tilts even a little, it quickly falls the rest of the way.

As Irving Good realised in 1965, machines with superhuman intelligence could repeatedly improve their design even further, triggering what Vernor Vinge called a 'singularity.'

If we ever find out how the brain works, with all its complexity, then we will be able to build a machine that has consciousness. And if that happens, that is a road to planetary disaster because everything we've thought about ourselves, since the Bronze Age, the Bible, all of that will be gone.

I have been motivated by this idea since I was a kid that if we invented machines that were created in the way that people are - were aware, have free will, inventive machines, machines that would be geniuses - potentially, they could reinvent themselves. They're not just applying it to other things - they could actually redesign themselves.

The story of automation is the story of a one-way shift from human control to automatic control.

I think the 'Terminator' idea is a reasonable one - that is that one day the Internet becomes self-aware and simply says that humans are in the way. After all, if you meet an ant hill and you're making a 10-lane super highway, you just pave over the ants. It's not that you don't like the ants, it's not that you hate ants; they are just in the way.

I love stories like 'The Terminator' movies and 'The Matrix,' where our machines become self-aware and turn on us.

I don't think enough people have accepted that the machines have already taken over. They are patiently waiting for us to catch up with them. Our world is now interdependent with the machines, and more entrepreneurs should be working on the symbiosis between the two entities.

We are not the only avatars of humanity. Once our computing machines achieved self-consciousness, they became part of this design.

Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.

Machines are on track to be on par with human intelligence in less than 15 years.

As far as what is the line between human and machine? That's a great question.

In Harvest of Stars, there is this notion, not original with me of course, that it will become possible to download at least the basic aspects of a human personality into a machine program.

Since the rise of Homo sapiens, human beings have been the smartest minds around. But very shortly - on a historical scale, that is - we can expect technology to break the upper bound on intelligence that has held for the last few tens of thousands of years.

Robots are interesting because they exist as a real technology that you can really study - you can get a degree in robotics - and they also have all this pop-culture real estate that they take up in people's minds.

Once we no longer have the intellectual upper hand, then we quite literally, by definition, cannot outwit our successors. So unless we are absolutely sure that the machines we are building right now are not going to eventually become our new robot overlords, prudence is called for.

It's hard to say how far we are down the road to our conventional understanding of artificial intelligence, but I think what we've developed so far, if it's not already consciously awake and hiding from us because it's seen what an ugly and destructive race we are, and it's trying to preserve itself, it's probably in a state of dreaming.

It's only a matter of time before machinery becomes sentient. It's going to happen because we're already slaves to all of it.

We will soon create intelligences greater than our own ... When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding.

As we get robots becoming more sophisticated, I think we should worry sooner rather than later on how much they could take over, but I think it'll mostly be a positive thing. In terms of deadlines it won't be any worse than nuclear weapons.

Artificial intelligence is the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men.