Futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil is joining Google as its Director of Engineering on Monday. Mr Kurzweil, who is well-known for his opinions on artificial intelligence and extending human longevity, made the announcement on his blog.
He said “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.”
The new role is described as working on “new projects involving machine learning and language processing”.
[kurzweilai.net]