Google, which is working on projects including self-driving cars and robots, has become increasingly focused on artificial intelligence in recent years.

In 2012, it hired Ray Kurzweil, considered one of the leading minds in the field, and in May it announced a partnership with NASA and several universities to launch the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab. [...]

TechCrunch is also saying that this move is the latest by Google to build up its roster of artificial intelligence companies and experts in order to become dominant in the field.

“If all three of DeepMind’s founders work for Google, they will join inventor, entrepreneur, author, and futurist Ray Kurzweil, who was hired in 2012 as a director of engineering focused on machine learning and language processing.… read more

Google futurist Ray Kurzweil is working to improve its search function to the point where humans could type in a sentence, and the computer could understand the query on an emotional level.

And earlier this month, Yahoo acquired Aviate, a company that organizes and searches for phone apps based on what it thinks you’ll be looking for at a certain time. [...]

Kurzweil believes a conscious machine capable of understanding complex natural language will be developed within the next 16 years.

”I’ve had a consistent date of 2029 for that vision,” he told Wired, ”and that doesn’t just mean logical intelligence. It means emotional intelligence, being funny, getting the joke, being sexy, being loving, understanding human emotion.”

Google’s chief engineer, Ray Kurzweil, envisions a ”cybernetic friend” based on deep learning… read more

Ray Kurzweil has been quick to point out the remarkable growth that’s possible with solar technology. According to Kurzweil’s calculations, we can expect to be energy independent within the next 20 years.

In his 2012 book Abundance — endorsed by Kurzweil — entrepreneur Peter Diamandis makes the most eloquent case for why the sun is such an important player in any future scenarios of energy self-sufficiency. [...]

Few of us can conceive of the pace with which technological power is developing.

Ray Kurzweil (author, futurist, and a director of engineering at Google) predicts that, by 2025, we’ll have a computer which has the processing power of the human brain.

Society will also have to work out how it’s going to handle the hyper-connectivity of a multisensory internet. [...]

After poring over the work of Ray Kurzweil and other futurists trying to figure out how, exactly, his artificially intelligent female lead should operate, Jonze arrived at a critical insight: Her, he realized, isn’t a movie about technology. It’s a movie about people. With that, the film took shape. [...]

Popularized by science fiction author Vernor Vinge as well as inventor and now Google director of engineering Ray Kurzweil, the singularity is a theoretical point in future history when artificial intelligences exceed the power of the human mind, become self-aware and dramatically change the balance of power on the planet while simultaneously transforming the very nature of humanity itself.

Google recently doubled down on the idea of using… read more

A few weeks into the making of Her, Spike Jonze’s new flick about romance in the age of artificial intelligence, the director had something of a breakthrough.

After poring over the work of Ray Kurzweil and other futurists trying to figure out how, exactly, his artificially intelligent female lead should operate, Jonze arrived at a critical insight: Her, he realized, isn’t a movie about technology. It’s a movie… read more

With the acceleration of change, the uncertainty that once characterized the far future is coming to characterize the near future.

Some futurists, including Ray Kurzweil, are convinced that, by the year 2020, the rate of change will be so great that human minds will be incapable of encompassing or understanding it. It is true that this accelerating change dynamic continues to influence the telecommunications market in ways that… read more