Kurzweil Focuses on AI at Google

In a recent interview with Singularity Hub, inventor and new Google Director of Engineering Ray Kurzweil dished on his latest pet project: a way to leverage Google’s resources to create intelligent computers that can understand human language on a “deep level.” Doing so would enable the company to create a type of artificial intelligence that would greatly improve search engines.

Computers would eventually be able to understand natural language and perceive the meanings behind the words we’re typing when we search the Internet (or a data store). In that way, computers would eventually be able to suss out what we want to know, even if we haven’t made a direct query. According to Kurzweil:

 “I envision some years from now that the majority of search queries will be answered without you actually asking. It’ll just know this is something that you’re going to want to see.”

Author/inventor/futurist Kurzweil previously gave us  CCD flatbed scanners, optical character recognition, print-to-speech reading machines for the blind, and text-to-speech synthesizers. His previous work on natural language understanding will be leveraged at Google, and some of these ideas form the basis of his last book, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Though Revealed. Of course, not everyone agrees it will work, including this fellow at MIT Technology Review.

Source: Singularity Hub