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

“Ray Kurzweil works at worldcat.org”

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

“You can certainly argue that, philosophically, that is not your father. That is a replica, but I can actually make a strong case that it would be more like my father than my father would be, were he to live.”

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

“So What's Left? Let's consider where we are, circa early 2030s. We've eliminated the heart, lungs, red and white blood cells, platelets, pancreas, thyroid and all the hormone-producing organs, kidneys, bladder, liver, lower esophagus, stomach, small intestines, large intestines, and bowel. What we have left at this point is the skeleton, skin, sex organs, sensory organs, mouth and upper esophagus, and brain.”

“If you use conventional data compression on the genome, you get about 23 million bytes , which is a level of complexity we can handle.”