Some quotes from the first chapter of The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil:
I regard someone who understands the Singularity and who has reflected on its implications for his or her own life as a “singularitarian”. -p7
Our biological 1.0 bodies are likewise frail and subject to myriad of failure modes. -p9
Ours is the species that inherently seeks to extend its physical and mental reach beyond current limitations. -p9
My models show that we are doubling the paradigm-shift rate every decade. -p11
We won’t experience one hundred hyears of technological advance in the twenty-first century; we will witness on the order of twenty thousands years of progress (again, when measured by today’s rate of progress), or about one thousand times greater than what was achieved in the twentieth century. -p11
Epoch Four: Technology
Consider that mammals have added abnout one cubic inch of brain matter every hundred tousand years, wheras we are roughly doubling the computational capacity of computers every year. - p16
The Singularity is Near
Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work—the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection. -p21
Is there a point at which humans are unable to think fast enough to keep up? For unenhanced humans, clearly so. But what would 1000 scientists, each 1000 times more intelligent than human scientists today, and each operating 1000 times faster than contemprary humans accomplish? -p24