Quotes About Evolution

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.

capacity, and bandwidth) of information technologies

Most important, the intelligence that will emerge will continue to represent the human civilization, which is already a human-machine civilization. In other words, future machines will be human, even if they are not biological. This will be the next step in evolution, the next high-level paradigm shift, the next level of indirection.

To appreciate its apparent complication, it is useful to zoom in on its image (which you can access via the links in this endnote).

The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out.

GEORGE 2048: We like to think of it as one civilization.

our primate ancestors was the development of a larger cerebral cortex as well as the development of increased volume of gray-matter tissue in certain regions of the brain.32 This change occurred, however, on the very slow timescale of biological evolution and still involves an inherent

No communication technology has ever disappeared, but instead becomes increasingly less important as the technological horizon widens.

it could be simply an accident of fate that our brains are too weak to understand themselves. Think of the lowly giraffe, for instance, whose brain is obviously far below the level required for self-understanding—yet it is remarkably similar to our brain.

Machines can pool their resources, intelligence, and memories. Two machines—or one million machines—can join together to become one and then become separate again. Multiple machines can do both at the same time: become one and separate simultaneously. Humans call this falling in love, but our biological ability to do this is fleeting and unreliable.

However, we have the benefits of the billions of years of evolution that have already taken place, which are responsible for the greatly increased order of complexity in the natural world. We can now benefit from it by using our evolved tools to reverse engineer the products of biological evolution (most importantly, the human brain).

Where some people see a divine hand, others see a multiverse spawning an evolution of universes with the boring (non-information-bearing) ones dying out. But regardless of how our universe got to be the way it is, we can start our story with a world based on information.

Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons. —POPULAR MECHANICS

Once nonbiological intelligence gets a foothold in the human brain (this has already started with computerized neural implants), the machine intelligence in our brains will grow exponentially (as it has been doing all along), at least doubling in power each year.

Two billion years ago, our ancestors were microbes; a half-billion years ago, fish; a hundred million years ago, something like mice; ten million years ago, arboreal apes; and a million years ago, proto-humans puzzling out the taming of fire. Our evolutionary lineage is marked by mastery of change. In our time, the pace is quickening. —CARL SAGAN

Von Neumann makes two important observations here: acceleration and singularity. The first idea is that human progress is exponential (that is, it expands by repeatedly multiplying by a constant) rather than linear (that is, expanding by repeatedly adding a constant).

Evolution works through indirection: each stage or epoch uses the information-processing methods of the previous epoch to create the next.

Computers are about one hundred million times more powerful for the same unit cost than they were a half century ago. If the automobile industry had made as much progress in the past fifty years, a car today would cost a hundredth of a cent and go faster than the speed of light. As

Innovations created by evolution encourage and enable faster evolution. In the case of the evolution of life-forms, the most notable early example is DNA, which provides a recorded and protected transcription of life's design from which to launch further experiments

A universe saturated with intelligence at 1090 cps would be one trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times more powerful than all biological human brains on Earth today.3 Even a one-kilogram "cold" computer has a peak potential of 1042 cps, as I reviewed in chapter 3, which is ten thousand trillion (1016) times more powerful than all biological human brains.

Ray Kurzweil La Singularidad está cerca Cuando los humanos transcendamos la biología

Our ability to create models—virtual realities—in our brains, combined with our modest-looking thumbs, has been sufficient to usher in another form of evolution: technology. That development enabled the persistence of the accelerating pace that started with biological evolution. It will continue until the entire universe is at our fingertips.

Así fue como desarrollé una teoría a la que llamo ley de los rendimientos acelerados, que explica por qué la tecnología y los procesos evolutivos en general progresan de forma exponencial.

it took ninety years to achieve the first MIPS per thousand dollars; now we add one MIPS per thousand dollars every five hours.