Top 100 Ray Kurzweil Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Find your passion, learn how to add value to it, and commit to a lifetime of learning.”

— Ray Kurzweil

2. “Mobile phones are misnamed. They should be called gateways to human knowledge.”

— Ray Kurzweil

3. “Does God exist? Well, I would say, not yet.”

— Ray Kurzweil

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

— Ray Kurzweil

5. “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

6. “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

7. “Emotional intelligence is what humans are good at and that’s not a sideshow. That’s the cutting edge of human intelligence.”

— Ray Kurzweil

8. “A Singularitarian is someone who understands the Singularity and has reflected on its meaning for his or her own life.”

— Ray Kurzweil

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

— Ray Kurzweil

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

— Ray Kurzweil

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

— Ray Kurzweil

12. “By the end of this decade, computers will disappear as distinct physical objects, with displays built in our eyeglasses, and electronics woven in our clothing, providing full-immersion visual virtual reality.”

— Ray Kurzweil

13. “The past is over; the present is fleeting; we live in the future.”

— Ray Kurzweil

14. “Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it.”

— Ray Kurzweil

15. “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.”

— Ray Kurzweil

16. “Biological evolution is too slow for the human species. Over the next few decades, it’s going to be left in the dust.”

— Ray Kurzweil

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 You and I are walking around with outdated software running in our bodies, which evolved in a very different era.”

— Ray Kurzweil

18. “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.”

— Ray Kurzweil

19. “In 1999, I said that in about a decade we would see technologies such as self-driving cars and mobile phones that could answer your questions, and people criticized these predictions as unrealistic.”

— Ray Kurzweil

20. “Play is just another version of work.”

— Ray Kurzweil

21. “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.”

— Ray Kurzweil

22. “The fate of the universe is a decision yet to be made, one which we will intelligently consider when the time is right.”

— Ray Kurzweil

23. “There are downsides to every technology. Fire kept us warm, but also burned down our villages.”

— Ray Kurzweil

24. “The purposeful destruction of information is the essence of intelligent work.”

— Ray Kurzweil

25. “Information defines your personality, your memories, your skills.”

— Ray Kurzweil

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

— Ray Kurzweil

27. “Inventing is a lot like surfing: you have to anticipate and catch the wave at just the right moment.”

— Ray Kurzweil

28. “Nature, and the natural human condition, generates tremendous suffering. We have the means to overcome that, and we should deploy it.”

— Ray Kurzweil

29. “I envision some years from now that the majority of search queries will be answered without you actually asking. It’ll just know this is something that you’re going to want to see.”

— Ray Kurzweil

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

— Ray Kurzweil

31. “If we could convert 0.03 percent of the sunlight that falls on the earth into energy, we could meet all of our projected needs for 2030.”

— Ray Kurzweil

32. “It is doubling now every two years. Doubling every two years means multiplying by 1,000 in 20 years. At that rate we’ll meet 100 percent of our energy needs in 20 years.”

— Ray Kurzweil

33. “I consider myself an inventor, entrepreneur, and author.”

— Ray Kurzweil

34. “We’ll be able to have very intelligent, little robots with computers going inside our bloodstream, keeping us healthy from inside, destroying cancer at the level of one cell.”

— Ray Kurzweil

35. “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

— Ray Kurzweil

36. “We appear to be programmed with the idea that there are ‘things’ outside of our self, and some are conscious, and some are not.”

— Ray Kurzweil

37. “Sometimes people talk about conflict between humans and machines, and you can see that in a lot of science fiction. But the machines were creating are not some invasion from Mars. We create these tools to expand our own reach.”

— Ray Kurzweil

38. “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

39. “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.”

— Ray Kurzweil

40. “So what used to fit in a building now fits in your pocket, what fits in your pocket now will fit inside a blood cell in 25 years.”

— Ray Kurzweil

41. “A lot of movies about artificial intelligence envision that AIs will be very intelligent but missing some key emotional qualities of humans and therefore turn out to be very dangerous.”

— Ray Kurzweil

42. “I set the date for the Singularity – representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability – as 2045. The nonbiological intelligence created in that year will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today.”

— Ray Kurzweil

43. “Launching a breakthrough idea is like shooting skeet. People’s needs change, so you must aim well ahead of the target to hit it.”

— Ray Kurzweil

44. “We’re democratizing the tools of creativity.”

— Ray Kurzweil

45. “Singularity? It’s a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed.”

— Ray Kurzweil

46. “Intelligence is that faculty of mind by which order is perceived in a situation previously considered disordered.” – R. W. Young.”

— Ray Kurzweil

47. “All of our schools need to bring ‘learn from doing’ into the mainstream education, not just afternoon.”

— Ray Kurzweil

48. “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

49. “The need to congregate workers in offices will gradually diminish.”

— Ray Kurzweil

50. “I do have to pick my priorities. Nobody can do everything.”

— Ray Kurzweil