This week I did all three of my groups dialectical journals.
Here they are:

From pages 1-50
1. "Consider Gary Kasparov, who scorned at the pathetic state of computer chess in 1992. Yet the relentless doubling of computer power every year enabled a computer to defeat him only five years later" (Kurzweil 8).
This is an interesting quote from the book, because it is a real life example of how computer's development rapidly could advance past humans. Gary Kasparov is a chess grandmaster, a world chess champion, and ranked to be a living genius. A computer that he once scorned, beat him, one of humanity's best and brightest at chess. This begs the question: what will computers be able to do in the rapidly approaching future?
2. "The power of information technologies is growing exponentially at even a faster pace, now doubling about every year" (Kurzweil 25).
Following this statement, on the next few pages are multiple charts showing exactly how this happens. "Power" is defined as anything, such as bandwidth, processing power, etc. It is incredible that computers have been advancing so fast, and even more so that it is possible that this generation of people will have access to so much.
3. "Evolution applies positive feedback: the more capable methods resulting from one stage of evolutionary progress are used to create the next stage. Evolution works through indirection: evolution created humans, humans created technology, humans are now working with increasingly advanced technology to create new generations of technology. By the time of the Singularity, there won't be a distinction between humans and technology. This is not because humans will have become what we think of as machines today, but rather machines will have progressed to be like humans and beyond" (Kurzweil 40).
This quote shows Kurzweil's viewpoint on one of the aspects of the singularity, the aspect of machine intelligence. It shows how he believes in the positive feedback of evolution and how it has affected us and our technology. It is interesting to think that machines could potentially evolve to be exactly like us, or even better than us.