Google engineering director Ray Kurzweil is, undoubtedly, one of the most accomplished men of our time. Since getting his start at MIT in the late 1960s, his inventions have included the flatbed scanner, optical character resolution and speech-to-text systems. He’s also a bestselling author, a successful entrepreneur, and an artificial intelligence pioneer.
His current title at Google, then, always seemed a little puzzling to me — after all, wasn’t he the sort of guy to set his sites on something a little higher than juicing sales of online advertisements at the world’s biggest Web search engine?
But the Google gig is much more than that, as I found out at a recent talk Kurzweil gave to group of tech luminaries. The event was connected to his being named as one of SVForum’s visionary award winners, an impressive group which includes Elon Musk and Bill Gates.
Kurzweil was light on specifics during the talk, in which he was interviewed by venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. However, it was an interesting look at what Google’s long-term vision is — it’s not just a search company, in Kurzweil’s telling of it.
Rather, Google is trying to bring about the technological singularity — creating a true artificial intelligence smart enough that it could begin to improve its own source code. When that occurs, machines can progress to far-future, science fiction levels of intelligence within our lifetimes. (Kurzweil predicts this technological leap will happen by 2040.)
That might sound a little outside the remit of a Web search company, but to hear Kurzweil tell it, it’s really not. A massive amount of data on every conceivable topic, like Google has built up in its Internet index, is a “necessary, but not sufficient” step in building such an AI, he said.
