Ray Kurzweil

"The primary political and philosophical issue of the next century will be the definition of who we are."

"One of the advantages of being in the futurism business is that by the time your readers are able to find fault with your forecasts, it is too late for them to ask for their money back."

"Before the next century is over, human beings will no longer be the most intelligent of capable type of entity on the planet."

"Order... is information that fits a purpose."

"I quickly realized that you had to have a good idea of the future if you were going to succeed as an inventor."

"Once a computer achieves human intelligence it will necessarily roar past it."

"It is in the nature of exponential growth that events develop extremely slowly for extremely long periods of time, but as one glides through the knee of the curve, events erupt at an increasingly furious pace. And that is what we will experience as we enter the twenty-first century."

"Neither noise nor information is predictable."

"Sometimes, a deeper order—a better fit to a purpose—is achieved through simplification rather than further increases in complexity."

"The twentieth century was like twenty years worth of change at todays rate of change."

"A primary reason that evolution—of life-forms or technology—speeds up is that it builds on its own increasing order."

"The speed and density of computation have been doubling every three years (at the beginning of the twentieth century) to one year (at the end of the twentieth century), regardless of the type of hardware used. ...Despite many decades of progress since the first calculating equipment was used in the 1890 census, it was not until the mid-1960s that this phenomenon was even noticed (although Alan Turing had an inkling of it in 1950)."