MIT Technology Review | Ray Kurzweil plans to create a mind at Google and have it serve you
January 18, 2013
Source: MIT Technology Review — January 18, 2013 | Will Knight
Famed AI researcher and incorrigable singularity forecaster Ray Kurzweil recently shed some more light on what his new job at Google will entail. It seems that he does, indeed, plan to build a prodigious artificial intelligence, which he hopes will understand the world to a much more sophisticated degree than anything built before, or at least that will act as if it does.
Kurzweil’s AI will be designed to analyze the vast quantities of information Google collects and to then serve as a super-intelligent personal assistant. He suggests it could eavesdrop on your every phone conversation and email exchange and then provide interesting and important information before you ever knew you wanted it. [...]
Comments (2)
by Mike
“He suggests it could eavesdrop on your every phone conversation and email exchange and then provide interesting and important information before you ever knew you wanted it.”
So this new super intelligence is going to add the audio equivalent of popup ads to my private phone conversations? Does anyone really want a commercial break in their 911 calls? It isn’t possible to get “interesting and important information before you knew you wanted it”. That is another way of saying “highly invasive advertisments”.
by Mindsight
Well, I, for one, welcome our new AI overlord. :)
Can’t wait to see what comes out of this association. I know it’s a few years premature (by Mr. Kurzweil’s timeline) to be talking about Turing test level AIs, but I’m sure he and Google see that the time is about right for something pretty special to emerge.
If ever there was a more golden opportunity for a futurist/forecaster to, as Alan Kay put it, predict the future by inventing it, I can’t recall it. And I suppose the naysayers are going to say this is his big chance to put up or shut up, already. :)
I’m wishing the whole Kurzweil team well, in what seems to be shaping up to be an exciting year.