Before the next century is over, human beings will no longer be the most intelligent or capable type of entity on the planet.
The primary political and philosophical issue of the next century will be the definition of who we are.
This acceleration is an inherent feature of technology.
Once a computer achieves a human level of intelligence, it will necessarily roar past it.
Neurons are extremely slow; electronic circuits are at least a million times faster. Once a computer achieves a human level of ability in understanding abstract concepts, recognizing patterns, and other attributes of human intelligence, it will be able to apply this ability to a knowledge base of all human-acquired—and machine-acquired—knowledge.
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.
Technology is the continuation of evolution by other means.
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.
A primary reason that evolution—of life-forms or technology—speeds up is that it builds on its own increasing order.
The introduction of technology on Earth is not merely the private affair of one of the Earth’s innumerable species. It is a pivotal event in the history of the planet. Evolution’s grandest creation—human intelligence—is providing the means fro the next stage of evolution, which is technology.
The emergence of technology was a milestone in the evolution of intelligence on Earth because it represented a new means of evolution recording its designs. the next milestone will be technology creating its own next generation without human intervention. That there is only a period of tens of thousands of years between these two milestones is another example of the exponentially quickening pace that is evolution.
Descartes was not intending to extol the virtues of rational thought. He was troubled by what has become known as the mind-body problem, the paradox of how mind can arise from nonmind, how thoughts and feelings can arise from the ordinary matter of the brain. Pushing rational skepticism to its limits, his statement really means “I think, that is, there is an undeniable mental phenomenon, some awareness, occurring, therefore all we know for sure is that something—let’s call it I—exists.” Viewed in this way, there is less of a gap than is commonly thought between Descartes and Buddhist notions of consciousness as the primary reality. Before 2030, we will have machines proclaiming Descartes’s dictum. And it won’t seem like a programmed response. The machines will be earnest and convincing. Should we believe them when they claim to be conscious entities with their own volition?
Intelligence is: (a) the most complex phenomenon in the Universe; or (b) a profoundly simple process. The answer, of course, is (c) both of the above. It’s another one of those great dualities that make life interesting.
Human thinking is merging with the world of machine intelligence that the human species initially created.
The primary issue is not the mass of the Universe, or the possible existence of antigravity, or of Einstein’s so-called cosmological constant. Rather, the fate of the Universe is a decision yet to be made, one which we will intelligently consider when the time is right.