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
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.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the exponential growth of technology and its increasing accessibility over time.
Ray Kurzweil's quote reflects on the remarkable advancements in computing power and cost-effectiveness that have occurred over the past few decades. He illustrates how a powerful computer, once confined to an entire building, has become a portable device in our pockets today, forecasting even greater miniaturization and efficiency in the future. This underlines the rapid evolution of technology and invites us to consider the possibilities that lie ahead.
In practice
During a tech conference to illustrate the progress of computer technology.
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.
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.
So what used to fit in a building now fits in your pocket, what fits in your pocket now will fit inside a blood cell in 25 years.
You're not going to tell me they built fifty-foot-high killer golems, are you?" "Only a man would think of that. It's our job," said Moist. "If you don't think of fifty-foot-high killer golems first, someone else will.
It wasn't very long ago when you wouldn't even think about there being health information on the smartphone. There's financial information. There's your conversations; there's business secrets. There's probably more information about you on here than exists in your home.
We went to Ladakh ... and we asked this woman, 'What was the benefit you had from solar electricity?' And she thought for a minute and said, 'It's the first time I can see my husband's face in winter.'
We curate our lives around this perceived sense of perfection, because we get rewarded in these short term signals: Hearts, likes, thumbs up. We conflate that with value, and we conflate it with truth, and instead, what it really is is fake, brittle popularity that's short term and leaves you even more vacant and empty before you did it.
In our interconnected world, novel technology could empower just one fanatic, or some weirdo with a mindset of those who now design computer viruses, to trigger some kind of disaster. Indeed, catastrophe could arise simply from technical misadventure - error rather than terror.
I see the player piano as the grandfather of the computer, the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in, the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no and where there is no refuge.
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