Ray Kurzweil talks about his first two months at Google

Since December 2012, the famous inventor and futurologist Ray Kurzweil has been working for Google. This is precisely the person who gave the scientific justification for the technological singularity - the explosive scientific and technological process that will begin after the appearance of powerful artificial intelligence (superior to human) and the cyborgization of people. According to Moore’s law and extrapolation, this should happen around 2045 .

Google goes straight to technological singularity. At least, it was Google, along with NASA, who became the main sponsors of the multidisciplinary Singularity University , created in 2009, and Google’s research in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence is in good agreement with the future that Kurzweil is talking about.

In this sense, it is very interesting what exactly the famous futurologist is doing at the new place of work, who nominally received the position of technical director in the field of machine learning and natural language processing. Recently published his interview on the results of the first two months of work.

Earlier, Kurzweil already said that he was invited to the company personally by Larry Page with the long-term goal of creating computers that understand human speech and are capable of “thinking like people”. In other words, it should help in the development of strong artificial intelligence.

Now Ray told a little more about how he was invited to the company. He says he met Larry Page in July about his new book, How to Create a Mind"(How To Create A Mind). He said that he wanted to establish a startup to implement the ideas presented in the book. Larry Page persuaded him to do this on Google, because the company has “unique resources” for this task. Kurzweil now admits that his faith in these words only deepened after two months at Google.

Ray Kurzweil since the 70s has been developing computer systems for speech recognition. At Google, he led this area to develop technologies that can analyze the semantic context, that is, the meaning of each word, choosing the appropriate meaning of the word in each specific situation.

Google has long been solving this problem. To this end, projects such as Knowledge Graph have been created.- A base of 700 million semantic constructions and billions of connections between them. A development team led by Kurzweil is developing software that will become part of a “biological-like” system that can learn and evolve in a similar way to the human brain, Kurzweil said.

Kurzweil’s prediction of technological singularity indicates that the computer must pass the Turing test in 2029. When asked if his calculations had changed now, Ray Kurzweil answered: "My goal is to make just such a contribution to the creation of artificial intelligence, this is a project for 50 years ... and now for the first time I have time and resources for its implementation."