The Age of Spiritual Machines

A primary reason that evolution—of life-forms or technology—speeds up is that it builds on its own increasing order.

Before the next century is over, human beings will no longer be the most intelligent of capable type of entity on the planet.

Order... is information that fits a purpose.

The Law of Accelerating Returns: As order exponentially increases, time exponentially speeds up (that is, the time interval between salient events grows shorter as time passes). The Law... applies specifically to evolutionary processes.

Once a computer achieves human intelligence it will necessarily roar past it.

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.

The speed and density of computation have been doubling every three years (at the beginning of the twentieth century) to one year (at the end of the twentieth century), regardless of the type of hardware used. ...Despite many decades of progress since the first calculating equipment was used in the 1890 census, it was not until the mid-1960s that this phenomenon was even noticed (although Alan Turing had an inkling of it in 1950).

Neither noise nor information is predictable.

The primary political and philosophical issue of the next century will be the definition of who we are.

The Law of Time and Chaos: In a process, the time interval between salient events (that is, events that change the nature of the process, or significantly affect the future of the process) expands of contracts along with the amount of chaos.

Sometimes, a deeper order—a better fit to a purpose—is achieved through simplification rather than further increases in complexity.