No matter what problem you encounter, whether it's a grand challenge for humanity or a personal problem of your own, there's an idea out there that can overcome it. And you can find that idea.
Ray KurzweilRead
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.
Interpretation
Inventions should be designed with future trends in mind, not just current conditions.
Ray Kurzweil emphasizes the importance of long-term thinking in the process of invention. He suggests that for an invention to be successful and viable, it must align with the future context and trends of the world once it is completed, rather than the circumstances present at the time of its conception.
In practice
In a technology conference when discussing the future of AI and its implications on society.
No matter what problem you encounter, whether it's a grand challenge for humanity or a personal problem of your own, there's an idea out there that can overcome it. And you can find that idea.
When I was a student at MIT, we all shared one computer and it took up a whole building. The computer in your cell phone today is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful. What now fits in your pocket 25 years from now will fit into a blood cell and will again be millions of times more cost effective.
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.
When you talk to a human in 2035, you'll be talking to someone that's a combination of biological and non-biological intelligence.
Mobile phones are misnamed. They should be called gateways to human knowledge.
I'm working on artificial intelligence. Actually, natural language understanding, which is to get computers to understand the meaning of documents.
No matter how deeply disturbing the thought of using the environment to manipulate behavior for national advantages to some, the technology permitting such use will very probably develop within the next few decades.
Because the Internet is so new, we still don't really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that's what we're used to. So people complain that there's a lot of rubbish online, or that it's dominated by Americans, or that you can't necessarily trust what you read on the Web.
Anyone who has had actual contact with the making of the inventions that built the radio art knows that these inventions have been the product of experiment and work based on physical reasoning, rather than on the mathematicians' calculations and formulae. Precisely the opposite impression is obtained from many of our present day text books and publications.
The Internet's abundance - of information, goods, tastes and sources of authority - creates unparalleled opportunities for individuals to get exactly what they want. But this plenitude threatens political and cultural authorities who believe in telling individuals what they can have rather than letting them choose for themselves.
If an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc analyst has access to query raw SIGINT databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want. Phone number, email, user id, cell phone handset id (IMEI), and so on - it's all the same.
Without big data analytics, companies are blind and deaf, wandering out onto the Web like deer on a freeway.
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