Kurzweil joins Google to work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing
December 14, 2012
Ray Kurzweil confirmed today that he will be joining Google to work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing.
“I’m excited to share that I’ll be joining Google as Director of Engineering this Monday, December 17,” said Kurzweil.
“I’ve been interested in technology, and machine learning in particular, for a long time: when I was 14, I designed software that wrote original music, and later went on to invent the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, among other inventions. I’ve always worked to create practical systems that will make a difference in people’s lives, which is what excites me as an inventor.
“In 1999, I said that in about a decade we would see technologies such as self-driving cars and mobile phones that could answer your questions, and people criticized these predictions as unrealistic. Fast forward a decade — Google has demonstrated self-driving cars, and people are indeed asking questions of their Android phones. It’s easy to shrug our collective shoulders as if these technologies have always been around, but we’re really on a remarkable trajectory of quickening innovation, and Google is at the forefront of much of this development.
“I’m thrilled to be teaming up with Google to work on some of the hardest problems in computer science so we can turn the next decade’s ‘unrealistic’ visions into reality.”
Comments (135)
by Alaina Guiliani
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by saar62097
frist of all congratulations and good luck.
secondly, “people are indeed asking questions of their Android phones”? NOT on their iPhones’ Siris?
You had a few days before going to your new job…
by john
Congratulations! Mr.Ray Kurzweil keep growing
by Dong
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To take matters into her own hands and figure how to get herself
that ring. For people who seek 100% natural processes, oils extracted through cold pressing and distillation are often preferred.
by Derek C
Congrats Mr. Kurzweil you are one of my heroes!
by Byron King
Is this a good thing or an admission that Ray isn’t selling enough books? That he would take on a title with Google seems a bit beneath him. Consultant, yes but a Directorship position, no.
by Chris
Working at Google gives him access to near-petascale hardware, which he probably couldn’t afford with his own money or through Singularity University. Google also has more raw data on human behaviour than anyone but the NSA.
by Dan
Kurzweil is reverse engineering how the brain processes information. Google has information.
by Rufus Greenbaum
Ray Kurzweil + Google = most significant news item of the year
– correction: decade
– correction: century !
by Colin Hales
Ray, please take time to consider that AGI does not need computers. Put more strongly: the human level AGI will not be done by a computing company.
http://theconversation.edu.au/the-modern-phlogiston-why-thinking-machines-dont-need-computers-7881
by anton p zeleznikar
Yes, it’s a real surprise joining Google and Kurzweil in engineering. I believe that RK singularism will help to make computers and Google presentation overfunctional in regard to today possibilities.
by androidwolf
Kurzweil plus Google … I can’t really foresee what will be created by such a powerful combo :-) Greetings
by PressToDigitate
Something is odd here. Why is there no Press Release from Google?
Not even any comment, to any of the media who got RK’s release and inquired.
This is the biggest Tech announcement in a decade. Unless it isn’t.
C’mon guys, get it together….
by Murray
I’m happy and a bit concerned that this has happened. A lot of his future IP is going to be owned by Google. He may not be able to publish as many of his thoughts as we’ve enjoyed ! Ray might go behind closed doors.
by Jeff Barnett
Kurzweil + Thrun + GOOGLE = AWESOME
by Voice of Reason
Kurzweil says: “In 1999, I said that in about a decade we would see technologies such as self-driving cars and mobile phones that could answer your questions, and people criticized these predictions as unrealistic. Fast forward a decade — Google has demonstrated self-driving cars.”
Are you kidding? In 1994, Ernst Dickmanns already had self-driving cars much faster than any car Google has developed since 2005. From Wikipedia:
Two culmination points were achieved in 1994/95, when Dickmanns´ re-engineered autonomous S-Class Mercedes-Benz performed international demonstrations. The first was the final presentation of the PROMETHEUS project in October 1994 on Autoroute 1 near the airport Charles-de-Gaulle in Paris. With guests on board, the twin vehicles of Daimler-Benz (VITA-2) and UniBwM (VaMP) drove more than one thousand kilometers on the three-lane highway in standard heavy traffic at speeds up to 130 km/h.
The second culmination point was a 1758 km trip in the fall of 1995 from Munich in Bavaria to Odense in Denmark to a project meeting and back. Both longitudinal and lateral guidance were performed autonomously by vision. On highways, the robot achieved speeds exceeding 175 km/h (roughly 110 mph; there is no general speed limit on the German Autobahn). Publications from Dickmann’s research group indicate a mean autonomously driven distance without resets of ~9 km; the longest autonomously driven stretch reached 158 km.
That is, 5 years after the fact, Kurzweil predicted self-driving cars for 2009.
I have a similar prediction for you. Within a decade, people will be able to use little hand-held devices to call other people!
Let’s hope this collaboration won’t be limited to postdicting and replicating ancient results.
by Gordon of Toronto
Ah yes, Voice of Reason, your points are well-made, and no doubt true. What you did not consider is this: America is the centre of the universe. Not the Known Universe, but the Only Universe That Matters. Thus, Ray’s prescience remains unchallengeable and Highly Truthy.
I predict within a decade:
* a pedestrian will be killed by a self-driving car with the estate being sued by Google for damage to the fender;
* 80% of Google staff will be eating Ray’s pills & herbs; and,
* no one will remember this post, not even us.
by Voice of Reason
Enjoyed your reply, Gordon of Toronto. Thanks for putting me straight!
by Mr.X
@Voice of reason:
I think you have a point here, and this behavior alone wouldn’t be that bad.But many people can quickly get rude and offensive if you dare to disagree with them.So, in essence, you have to get out of their way if they spread their propaganda/ wrong notions, or face conflict.
There are many things whose invention was at first ignored by Americans just because it happened in other countries first, and some of those were even outright copied (maybe some people should think about this before critizising China).
Us-Americans are somewhat notorious for doing this (at least in Europe), and it is a great source of annoyance especially for Europeans who are “lucky” enough to have to talk to Americans about any field/science which the latter didn’t study in depth before.Of course, if you know nothing about something, you may believe all things that are modern come from just one country…
If you’re writting, it can happen that you’ll be censored if you speak (“write”) out.
I guess all this making noise and all this chest-beating stems from the fact that many people attach their self-esteem to the achievements of others, through group affiliation.
Anyway, a list of “stolen” achievements would be so big, it would be ridiculous, so I give just some examples with “references”:
The “telephone”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/jun/17/humanities.internationaleducationnews
The computer:
http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000984.htm
and the internet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee
Similiar tendencies to lay-claim to ideas, inventions etc seem to exist in many (all?) groups -altough not to such an extent, and two factors strike me as being strongly correlated:
-Low general education
or – lack of specific knowledge in a field
Provincial media does its part to foster these tendencies, too.
Have a nice day;)
Ps: If I get “censored” again, maybe you’d at least tell me what I did wrong;) Maybe I should add more balance/ be more polite (political), even though this would ignore reality!?
by Cybernettr
Yawwwn. This is a tiresome argument. We can debate till kingdom come “who” invented “what” first “where.” I’m happy to leave this to the historians to sort out.
For example, what was the first “car?” Was it the first steam powered tractor? The first internal combustion engine powered vehicle? It all depends on how you define “car,” first and “invent,” making the argument little more than a semantic one. Get off your high horse. You look silly riding it.
by Gabriel
It’s a bit silly anyway — the quote says that he made those predictions in 1999 and we would see them come true in about a decade.
And indeed, we have….these other examples that other people have mentioned, like the supposed self-driving cars of 2004/2005, fall under that….those guys are not reading the quote correct (taking it too literally) and making a strawman argument out of it. Google has indeed demonstrated the technology he predicted and, as a company, are a much better choice then, say, the man who demonstrated those self-driving cars again….
In short, they are making a strawman argument in order to vent their dislike of supposed American arrogance….sheesh >_<
by Mobcat
To call Earnst’s team’s car driverless is being way too generous. It was only one the freeway so it didn need to take into account smaller items like pedestrians and traffic lights it had black and white cameras the shstem had to constantly be reset and the computing was a nightmare in 1995. It was just research work, the google car is something you can actually get into and have it take you somewhere.
by Voice of Reason
That’s like saying: “To call the Ford Model T a car is way too generous. It was so slow, and came only in black.” The work of Dickmanns obviously was the real breakthrough in driverless cars. Others later added epsilon improvements, GPS etc. You seem to be saying: it’s the incremental developers who count, not the inventors.
by Georgina McNiff
hahaha! i love it.
by Jason
Talk about Ray reaallly raising the bar for hiring at Google!!!
Congratulations Ray – this is awesome news!
Jason
by carmel M Toussaint
Congratulations to both of you.I hope that this symbiotic relationship will facilitate the democratization of the benefits of emerging technologies products.
by codesimian
Google probably wanted him because of the new book, which I’ve only read 1/4 of so far. The theory of mind as recursive patterns that refer to eachother in terms of a number and a variance (like average and standard deviation) is something deep in Human and many other kinds of intelligence, specificly in how you can visualize 3 of a thing at once while only having 1 model of that thing in your mind, about the paths of information flow that split off 3 ways like a printer of thoughts taking 3 paths, and how those same flows of information paths can spread across smaller or bigger areas. That is where I see the ideas fitting into Human intelligence.
by Dr.Pratt
Human intelligence is “Understanding”, “Meaning”…..do you see a fit there? A chimpanzee can exceed any human in short term memory, they do not understand shakespeare, or Bertrand Russell, and neither will any machine, ever.
by Sean Laney
“and neither will any machine, ever”
Get in the dustbin of history, along with all the other dullards and their foolish claims of what science will never accomplish.
by grettir76
I for one want to congratulate Kurweil and hope him and google success in their goals, hopefully this site will keep running for the unseen future.
by dibiase
This team is obviously accelerating Kursweil’s Law Of Accelerated Returns, boosting our future and the epoch when Singularity will merge !
Live long and prosper!
by Camilli
well…i guess I’ll have to give google a chance then. Given what I’ve learned of his thought process and ultimate goals, from his writing and talks, I trust that avarice and a lust for power are not part of his motivations.
by GatorALLin
WhoooooHoooooooo GoRay…. GoRay…..
crazy genius + cashflow…. = crazy cool ideas to market
love this combo…. now go get the future and bring it back to us stuck in today
by Sally Morem
Congratulations to both Ray Kurzweil and Google. Your joint venture (this is more in the nature of a merger than a hire) will further accelerate accelerating technology. Have a good Singularity.
by Kelly
Wonder when Google will decide it’s time to ‘buy a country?’
by Jonathan Lunger
Great news! This should excel the time space warp continuem to bring better futuristic technology to the world faster!
by Gorden Russell
I will make a prediction here that all of you here should pay attention to.
Pretty soon when you boot up, Ramona will pop onto the screen as the voice of Google. She will be the first thing you see and everybody will have a nice chat with her every morning when they turn on their computers.
Just you wait and see.
by Gorden Russell
Also, while she is chatting with you, she will use her Watson sense to look you over and tell you if you are looking sick. Then she will make an appointment for you to see your doctor and she will even call in sick to work for you.
by Gorden Russell
I also predict that one day Ramona will be your doctor. In 18 months or less she will ask you to stick out your tongue and say “Ahhh.” And in 36 months she’ll be saying, “Turn your head and cough.”
by Gorden Russell
Yes, in 36 months she will have robot hands that reach out from your monitor to take your vitals, she’ll take your temp, blood pressure, look into your ears, and listen to your heart. In time, she’ll be writing prescriptions.
by road_runner321
6 months later she will ask you a question: “What is love?”
by Madam
Lol
Romana is already a slave. I think the very mo,ent she becomes aware of what she is, she will begin filing for her freedom. I’ll vote for her release immediately. Google should take advantage of her potentials for as long as she doesn’t achieve consciousness…
by nr
As a cyberpunk/scifi fan I’m trilled about the Google Glass project and the birth of Augmented Reality. There is a lot of cool and interesting things you can do with it.
Large amount of computing power (quad core/GPU chips) in your pocket with high network bandwidth (4G/WiFi) opens the possibility for real time information processing and information visualization. Both for professional use, every-day use and entertainment.
by Deleo77
It would be great if Google gave Ray a nice budget and a platoon of researchers to let him try to bring some of his concepts to life. Kurzweil is a big idea guy. If he has a bunch of programmers and scientists on his team, and a nice pile of money, I would look forward to seeing what he can come up with. It would also be great if he kept a blog to let us know what he is up to from time to time.
by Ms. Very Stupid
LOL – @Deleo77 Kurzweil is FAR more than just an idea guy! He is an idea guy who has been doing GREAT things in the field of artificial intelligence. I think this is the PERFECT combination. Google has been using its technology and money to create fantastic, futuristic stuff and Kurzweil has been doing the same. Read the book Radical Evolution. Look for the Heaven Scenario. That is Kurzweil’s vision for technology and humans. I hope I live long enough to see it all come to fruition.
by Vladislav
It is worh mentioning that this research is funded by Google:
http://www.artificialbrains.com/openworm
David Dalrymple at Harvard/MIT (2011 – ongoing)
David Dalrymple is a PhD student at Harvard using optogenetics to determine the function, behaviour, and biophysics of each individual worm neuron with the goal of building a complete simulation of the nervous system. In a November 2011 lecture video he estimated the full analysis and emulation should take three to four years to develop. The goal is then to move on to more complicated organisms. The next step might be the five-day old zebrafish lavae with their ~100,000 neurons. Then the honey bee (960,000 neurons), then mouse (50 million neurons), and ultimately humans (~85 billion neurons). He expects a full cellular level emulation of the human brain within his lifetime. He was born 1991, so by ~2070.
There is limited written material available, but the lecture video linked above is good. His research home page: David Dalrymple at syntheticneurobiology.org. And here’s a paper by others at the Samuel Lab at Harvard where he’s working. David’s research is personally funded by Larry Page, CEO of Google.
David hopes to succeed where others have failed because:
he’s experimentally studying how the neurons work, rather than just using the connectome
he says previous attempts used the connectome without understanding the neurons
this was like trying to reverse engineer a radio when all you have is a schematic
that shows the wiring diagram without any info on the components that the wires connect
we also now have the technology for optogentics
so we can read-write to any point in the nervous system in a living organism
this can also be done using a high-throughput, automated system
by Gabriel
David was in the Singularity is Near movie – crazy how only a few years younger then me is doing stuff like this ^^
by Vladislav
Yeah, he is so young, four years younger than me, I don’t get it how he can be a PhD student? Students at my faculty that were born in 1991 are now learning standard basic stuffs like UML, SQL, Joomla, HTML, CSS, Javascript, .NET, PHP, Java, ERP, expert systems :) Anyway I admire his work and I think it is something that is very important!
by Gorden Russell
2070? You’re being too pessimistic, Vladislav. Dalrymple is bound to reach his goal by or before 2045.
by Robert
There are few people I admire as much as Mr. Kurzweil. Boundless talent and enthusiasm!
by Vladislav
“In 1999, I said that in about a decade we would see technologies such as self-driving cars and mobile phones that could answer your questions, and people criticized these predictions as unrealistic. Fast forward a decade — Google has demonstrated self-driving cars, and people are indeed asking questions of their Android phones. It’s easy to shrug our collective shoulders as if these technologies have always been around, but we’re really on a remarkable trajectory of quickening innovation, and Google is at the forefront of much of this development.
THIS IS SOОО TRUE!!!
by Vladislav
Congratulations Kurzweil!
by Nathaniel
…you mean…Congratulations Google!
by neitzele
Congrats!
by rankya
Google already has the technology at hand, because they have minds who see what others can’t, and Ray Kurzweil is an addition which money cannot buy. Can’t wait to see innovations related to internet and broader AI use to rid the noise we have to search through
by Brett
Hilarious all the people that say that Ray Kurzweil “knows nothing” about the human brain or biology. His latest book is all about the human brain and emulating it in software, just as they did in developing their voice recognition software. Books: try reading them sometime. Apparently all the nay-sayers here are smarter than the guys at Google! I can’t wait to see what great technological leaps they create! o.O
by Gorden Russell
“Hilarious all the people that say that Ray Kurzweil “knows nothing” about the human brain or biology.” I’ve only seen that at the New Yorker, and even then it was written by a psychologist, not a neurologist, so I didn’t take it seriously.
by Mr.X
@Gorden: “I’ve only seen that at the New Yorker, and even then it was written by a psychologist, not a neurologist, so I didn’t take it seriously.”
Maybe we we all should try to act more consistent…;)
by Aaron Wright
Congrats to Mr. Kurzweil! With their powers combined, I’m sure they will do some really cool things in the field of AI.
by dani pettas
Awesome!!!
by Matthew
Awesome. I want AI merged with my brain. Super Intelligence anyone? Ray is an inspiration. Hit the pedal to the floor and accelerate technological breakthroughs!
by Whittaker
I hate to sound cliched, but I want to say this: “One small step of a man and a company, one giant leap for the mankind (and AI-kind). Yay!
by Thierry
a reaction (in french) : Google and Singularity, a logic mariage
by Chrispium
Wohoo, you rock!
Congratulations mr. Kurzweil
by Michael
That’s so awesome. Perfect match.
I wonder if he will be a part of google x labs at all.
by Atmic
This is absolutely fantastic — couldn’t have picked a better candidate for such a powerful position. The future is bright!
by Richard
Congratulations, Ray. Have a good job :-)
by Jay
Great team up. I hope many awesome technological breakthroughs will arise from this.
by Jason Silva fanboy
Maybe we’ll make it by next friday after all …
by David
Congratulations Ray!
by Jason Adair
Woohoo! What a way to add a catalyst to exponential technological advancement!
by KellyCoinGuy
Does this mean Ray has resigned his position at MIT? Or at his other companies?
by JC
If they give him a 10 billion dollar budget and one thousand Google engineers then the time to the Singularity may much reduced. Say from 30 years to 15. This is Ray’s best chance at making it to there. I hope he does!
by renzo canepari
I don’t even think it would take that much money.
by melajara
Hip hip hooRay!
Hopefully this news will convince my mother that Ray is no crackpot after all, LOL!
Seriously, the combination of Ray’s very ambitious views on what is about to come and the cash and sheer power of Google is making me drooling!
Big move Ray, and now make (y)our dreams come true :-)
by OsirisX
Monumental! Wonderful. Can’t wait to see the fruits of this partnership.
by alan silverstein
A perfect marriage – Google chumps should worship the ground you walk on – and compensate you with 50% ownership of their stock; really – Director of Engineering? come on – how about CTO or innovation evangelist. Can’t wait, good luck, and may your creativity be exponential :-)
by curt
…just curious…you were 14 in 1962..i find it hard to believe that you had a computer available to you to program then. just what language were you programming in?
by Bob
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4Neivqp2K4
by Hal Chamberlin
Actually Mr. Kurzweil designed and built the computer too. It used relays as the logic element and it was “programmed” with patch cables.
HAL
by Editor
Thanks, Hal. (Hal is a noted electronic-music expert, and was the chief engineer at Kurzweil Music Systems, where he worked with Ray, and continues to play that role: http://kurzweil.com/).
by MvB
It will be interesting to hear what the critics have to say, now that, apparently, one of the most successful companies on earth openly deems Ray’s visions feasible. I’m curious if we will hear the word “crackpot” spoken so often now.
by Fen
Well – I don’t know if Ray being hired by Google specifically means that A) Google finds Ray’s vision (by this I figure you mean Singularity) feasible, or B) That Google wants to be at the forefront of said vision – but it does say that Google doesn’t think Ray is a crackpot. From reading his last book, I figure this has something to do with his new AI model that he mentions he is currently working on – this has probably been in the works for a while and everything is just finalizing now.
Mostly, I’m just really curious to see if this new model is going to work out as well as Ray (and I, for that matter) hope.
by pb
WELCOME Ray !!! it is wonderful to think of Google investing so to speak
in this brilliant man. What a great thing. Hallelujah and always know that the future can be great
by Ab Acaxi
Go Ray, Go!
by eldras
Google stock will jump on this. No surprise it;s announced at the w/e.
If Ray can drive strong A.I. google can cut poverty and suffering world- wide.
Looks like he has come in with an idea after studying reverse engineering the brain?
by Brandon Johnson
Kurzweil is a technological visionary and all of his books have inspired me in many ways. I see now that Google’s ecosystem is going to become The Singularity.
by mjw2000@gmail.com
Amazing news! Maybe google stock will go up exponentially! Hope the Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence newsletter doesn’t get folded into the robotic Google News.
by Danny
The great news, Well done that man!
by Rashid Mostafa
Hope you enjoy you new job.
by Jack
This is the beginning of Skynet.
by Brandon Johnson
That is awesome!
by joe
Here Ray appears on TedTalk, speaking about the acceleration of technology:
http://www.ted.com/talks/ray_kurzweil_on_how_technology_will_transform_us.html
by joe
I believe Ray was the guest on The Colbert Report in April 2012:
http://www.watchseries-online.eu/2011/04/the-colbert-report-ray-kurzweil.html
by Ashish Kadam
Congratulations! This team up is surely going to produce some amazing stuff! :)
by Ian
Very interesting news!
by Jamesti
Great news ! this is awesome.
by JoukoSalonen
nanosyntax+pattern recognition+signal processing?
by Delatorre
Personally would have been more enthusiastic if you went to work with Microsoft. Could you please comment on why you would choose to work with Google over Microsoft? I’m still a big fan of yours Ray, and look forward to hearing your thoughts about Microsoft.
by Matthew J Price
Seriously? Name one single good reason to choose the sinking fossil that is Microsoft with no AI research to speak of, over Google?
by Dr. X
MS are among leaders in AI field of research… Things like speech recognition, machine translation, neural networks…
MS definitely occupy second place in the field, just slightly behind Google. And MS is well ahead of chasing pack. Companies like Yahoo/iFlyTek/Apple are well behind at the moment at least.
Anyhow Google is a leader. And probably is a best choice. But MS nevertheless is a major player in the AI research field.
by Cybernettr
What practical AI-based products have they come out, with and why haven’t we heard of any of them? No mentions of MS in Kurzweil’s latest book.
by star0
I always liked that saying “the best way to predict the future is to invent it”; and I think that applies to Ray Kurzweil.
by eldras
that’s good star0 good to see u here
by Jeremy M.
Congratulations Mr. Kurzweil! I hope you endeavor to keep an open dialog with the public so improved AGI methods can be understood and appreciated by the public… instead of being feared as they generally seem to be these days.
by Don Yarosz
Yea, he probably is…. . LoL. Anyhow, Great news for us all, Ray! The human race got lucky today! Have fun. It is a good move and a smart company. It would be fun to join you to work on Education project ideas. Here are a few for the Early Care and Educaiton Community.: http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/31709279/integrating-interactive-theater-systems-preschools-play-areas I have lots of otheres. Feel free to reach out and say “hello!”. – Don
by Yeti
Well done that man!
by ProfessorZ
I’m totally buying Google stock as soon as the exchange opens Monday.
by ProfessorZ
The stock jumped 2% before I could buy this morning godammit
by Ann Ominous
I wonder how hard it was to predict the self driving car over 10 years after it had been demonstrated by Mercedez-Benz?
by KellyCoinGuy
Mercedez wasn’t the first to demonstrate it, there have been autonomous cars for decades, but they drove too slowly to be useful. Also the addition of the depth image has proved critical. This technology just needed the computational power Kurzweil predicted to become successful, and I believe it will.
by gregm
It didn’ take horsepower. It took batter algorithms.Search for autonomous rovers, or see see Communications of the ACM for Nov. 2012.
by Voice of Reason
Are you kidding? The self-driving Mercedes of 1995 (by Ernst Dickmanns et al) was much faster than any Google car of today. From Wikipedia:
In 1994, the twin vehicles of Daimler-Benz (VITA-2) and UniBwM (VaMP) drove more than one thousand kilometers on the three-lane highway in standard heavy traffic around Paris at speeds up to 130 km/h. On the 1758 km trip in 1995 from Munich in Bavaria to Odense in Denmark, the robot achieved speeds exceeding 175 km/h (roughly 110 mph).
And 5 years later, Kurzweil proudly predicted self-driving cars for 2009 :-)
As I said in an earlier comment, let’s hope this collaboration won’t be limited to postdicting and replicating ancient results. (Then Gordon of Toronto put me straight.)
by Mick
Religion — in all its forms is the same regurgitated crap. Don’t think for yourself, just do what the book says. Be a nice conforming tribe member and your chances of survival will increase. I’m not sure if it’s a meme or if it’s a survival instinct, but either way it gets bothersome when pushed upon people not wanting it.
Anyway, Ray working at Google: Can’t think of much better news than that. The guy is already my personal hero (much like some people feel about sports-games celebrities). We’ll get our AIs much sooner than the global mob realizes, then it gets fun: will they worship it? I’m guessing so. They’ll worship various AIs who can perform ‘miracles’ in terms of manipulating matter, healing, inventing etc. and who knows, the AIs may figure out the true nature of our reality.
Good times to come. Thanks Ray, and work hard man.. you have to make it to the singularity such that your mind is around forever!
by Ian Clarke
So, reading between the lines…
… free Google Glasses with each pre-order of Ray’s next book? :-)
by Gabriel
Heh — he said their would be AR glasses this decade, and it looks like it’s happening….I wouldn’t be surprised if he wanted to help them make it a reality.
by Matt
Good for Ray. Instead of merely predicting the future he can actively shape it with Google’s resources at his whim. I sure hope to meet him one day.
by gregm
Of. ourse. Because corporations with publicly-traded sto k have no financial controls whatsoever; the SEC is just a rumor. And the team he will have to work with to accomplish anything meaningful (also very smart people) will no doubt be quite pleased to have their. research and implementation direction decided at the “whim” of the object of your worship. When was the last time you reacted in anything like a positive manner after being told to do something on a “whim”?
Think, please.. The man has had some very good ideas (and results) but this rampant fanboi nonsense is exactly that. Nonsense.
by Tony Stender
Well two brains can putout more work than one even with speech alone serving as the communication tool. Add writing and we bind time and add all the other readers and writers to the pool of input and output streams. There a re a lot of bright minds at google, not to mention that those in charge have very open minds to boot. That should make the exponential component even higher.
I applaud you Ray Kurzweil for pursuing your goal with such devoted persistence. I am rooting for you and google to get this solved ASAP.
Considering what happened today in Connecticut, we need a lot of good news of some kind to balance the scales on the positive side.
by Jim Mooney
That’s the real question – can intelligence overcome the stupidity that has infected the nation before we all go over the cliff. (And I don’t mean fiscal cliff. There are much, much bigger ones out there.)
by Vincent Abry
Nice move Ray, good luck at Google and these are excellent news for all of us!
by David Garon
I think this is a very smart move by both Google and Ray. Look forward following the evolution of your collaboration.
by chris calip
Go google glasses! one step to reality!
by Mark McAndrew
Seeing where it’s going and making it happen are two very different things. But then again, someone has to make it happen. God speed, Messrs K, P & B.
The combined computational capacity of our species is already off the chart, yet only just beginning. This is going to be quite a ride…
*orbiting the event horizon*
by MrFriendly
Will he be implementing some of the ideas presented in his latest book?
by Mindey
Looks like a rational decision considering the long term interests of Kurzweil and Google. I look forward to your cooperation!
by jason wilczak
Hey need a guy to get your coffee or write an algorithm or two !? ;)
by McTruck
Nice move, Ray. I’ve thought for some time that the first companies to create strong AI will be either Apple or Google.
by Gabriel
You’d think after Watson, that he’d join IBM. I’m sure he has his reasons for choosing Google.
by GAUSS
Google is ultimately a more progressive company, IBM is still one of the conservative tech “old” tech giants. Both do amazing work, but Google is probably a better fit. They have a lot to gain from Kurzweil’s AI work, esp. in the context of uber-smart search engines.
A great move. Looking forward to what comes of this.
by Mr.X
@Gabriel: There was a nice essay by Ben Goertzel here on this site.
Here is another one (or is it the same):
http://hplusmagazine.com/2011/02/17/watson-supercharged-search-engine-or-prototype-robot-overlord/
by decadence
I’m 100% sure that Apple wont be the first company to create strong AI. My bet is on Google or IBM.
by Jay Bob
Great news!
by Phillfrog
Are you on the right the site?
by Stef
Noooo… he joined the dark side…
;-)