Quotes About Evolution

As the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins puts the matter: "We are the only people who assume that we have ascended from apes. Everybody else takes it for granted that they are descended from gods." —

The Law of Accelerating Returns: As order exponentially increases, time exponentially speeds up (that is, the time interval between salient events grows shorter as time passes).

we invent tools—to compensate for our shortcomings.

The other required resource for continued exponential growth of order is the "chaos" of the environment in which the evolutionary process takes place and which provides the options for further diversity.

This will be our ultimate act of creativity: to create the capability of being creative. A nonbiological neocortex will ultimately be faster and could rapidly search for the kinds of metaphors that inspired Darwin and Einstein.

In my view there is something essentially special, after all, about human beings. We were the first species on Earth to combine a cognitive function and an effective opposable appendage (the thumb), so we were able to create technology that would extend our own horizons. No other species on Earth has accomplished this.

La futura era GNR (genética, nanotecnología, robótica) no nacerá debido solamente a la explosión exponencial de la computación, sino debido a la interacción y al gran número de sinergias que resultarán de múltiples avances tecnológicos entrelazados entre sí

Ultimately our brains, combined with the technologies they have fostered, will permit us to create a synthetic neocortex that will contain well beyond a mere 300 million pattern processors. Why not a billion? Or a trillion?

To compare the rate of progress of the biological evolution of intelligence to that of technological evolution, consider that the most advanced mammals have added about one cubic inch of brain matter every hundred thousand years, whereas we are roughly doubling the computational capacity of computers every year

Computers doubled in speed every three years at the beginning of the twentieth century, every two years in the 1950s and 1960s, and are now doubling in speed every twelve months.

The state of the art in computer technology is anything but static.

Machine intelligence will improve its own abilities in a feedback cycle that unaided human intelligence will not be able to follow.

I can understand why many observers do not readily embrace the obvious implications of what I have called the law of accelerating returns (the inherent acceleration of the rate of evolution, with technological evolution as a continuation of biological evolution).

Just as we find it hard to see beyond the event horizon of a black hole, we also find it difficult to see beyond the event horizon of the historical Singularity. How can we, with our brains each limited to 10^16 to 10^19 cps, imagine what our future civilization in 2099 with its 10^60 cps will be capable of thinking and doing?

once an AI goal is achieved, it is no longer considered as falling within the realm of AI and becomes instead just a useful general technique. AI is thus often regarded as the set of problems that have not yet been solved.

A century ago 30 percent of the U.S. workforce was employed on farms, with another 30 percent in factories. Both of these figures are now under 3 percent.2 Many of today's job categories, ranging from flight controller to Web designer, simply didn't exist a century ago.

The most important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become. —CHARLES DUBOIS

The story of evolution unfolds with increasing levels of abstraction.

We are a pattern that changes slowly but has stability and continuity, even though the stuff constituting the pattern changes quickly.

Increasing complexity" on its own is not, however, the ultimate goal or end-product of these evolutionary processes. Evolution results in better answers, not necessarily more complicated ones. Sometimes a superior solution is a simpler one.

The essential thing is to recognize that consciousness is a biological process like digestion, lactation, photosynthesis, or mitosis";

Our sole responsibility is to produce something smarter than we are; any problems beyond that are not ours to solve …

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.

The evolution of animal behavior does constitute a learning process, but it is learning by the species, not by the individual, and the fruits of this learning process are encoded in DNA.