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      "text": "The power of ideas to transform the world is itself accelerating.",
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      "text": "I emphasize the exponential-versus-linear perspective because it's the most important failure that prognosticators make in considering future trends. Most technology forecasts and forecasters ignore altogether this historical exponential view of technological progress. Indeed, almost everyone I meet has a linear view of the future. That's why people tend to overestimate what can be achieved in the short term (because we tend to leave out unnecessary details) but underestimate what can be achieved in the long term (because exponential growth is ignored).",
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      "text": "A primary reason that evolution—of life-forms or technology—speeds up is that it builds on its own increasing order.",
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      "text": "Exponential growth is seductive, starting out slowly and virtually unnoticeably, but beyond the knee of the curve it turns explosive and profoundly transformative. The future is widely misunderstood. Our forebears expected it to be pretty much like their present, which had been pretty much like their past. Exponential trends did exist one thousand years ago, but they were at that very early stage in which they were so flat and so slow that they looked like no trend at all. As a result, observers’ expectation of an unchanged future was fulfilled. Today, we anticipate continuous technological progress and the social repercussions that follow. But the future will be far more surprising than most people realize, because few observers have truly internalized the implications of the fact that the rate of change itself is accelerating.",
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      "text": "To this day I remain convinced of this basic philosophy: no matter what quandries we face...there is an idea that can enable us to prevail.",
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      "text": "So I am a completely different set of stuff than I was a month ago, and all that persists is the pattern of organization of that stuff. The pattern changes also, but slowly and in a continuum. I am rather like the pattern that water makes in a stream as it rushes past the rocks in its path. The actual molecules of water change every millisecond, but the pattern persists for hours or even years. Perhaps, therefore, we should say I am a pattern of matter and energy that persists over time. But there is a problem with this definition, as well, since we will ultimately be able to upload this pattern to replicate my body and brain to a sufficiently high degree of accuracy that the copy is indistinguishable from the original.",
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      "text": "So whether information represents one man's sentimental archive, the accumulating knowledge base of the human-machine civilization, or the mind files stored in our brains, what can we conclude about the ultimate longevity of software? The answer is simply this: Information lasts only so long as someone cares about it. The conclusion that I've come to [...] is that there is no set of hardware and software standards existing today, nor any likely to come along, that will provide any reasonable level of confidence that the stored information will still be accessible (without unreasonable levels of effort) decades from now.",
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      "text": "My spiritual education...took place at a Unitarian Church...The theme was \"many paths to the truth.\" …even the inconsistencies were illuminating. It became apparent to me that the basic truths were profound enough to transcend apparent contradictions.",
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      "text": "This, then, was the religion that I was raised with: veneration for human creativity and the power of ideas.",
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      "text": "Evolution is a process of creating patterns of increasing order....I believe that it's the evolution of patterns that constitutes the ultimate story of our world.",
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      "text": "The primary political and philosophical issue of the next century will be the definition of who we are.",
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      "text": "Sometimes, a deeper order—a better fit to a purpose—is achieved through simplification rather than further increases in complexity.",
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