Ray Kurzweil on Accelerating Change

Ray Kurzweil

So that means that the twentieth century wasn’t a hundred years of change at today’s rate of change, because we’ve been speeding up. It was actually twenty years of change at today’s rate of change. Exponential change is quite explosive, so in the next century we’ll make about twenty thousand years of change at today’s rate of progress⁠—about a thousand times greater than the twentieth century, and that century was no slouch for change.

Evolutionaries: Unlocking the Spiritual and Cultural Potential of Science’s Greatest Idea, page 231, Carter Phipps, New York: Harper Perennial, 2012

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More from Ray Kurzweil

The matter and energy in our vicinity will become infused with the intelligence, knowledge, creativity, beauty, and emotional intelligence (the ability to love, for example) of our human-machine civilization. . . . So in a sense, we can say that the Singularity will ultimately infuse the universe with spirit.