Monolith — May 10, 2013 | Elliott King

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Most recently, he has been appointed director of engineering at Google, a position that enables him to manage new projects involving machine learning and natural language integration and understanding. Directly applicable to the public face of Google, Kurzweil will become a pivotal factor in creating an even more rigorous search engine that was capable of analysing and interpreting semantic content used in digital language.

He could contribute to the growth of Google’s infamous AI brain project, led by Jeff Dean. “The reason I’m at Google is resources like that,” he recently told Wired. “The knowledge graph and very advanced syntactic parsing and a lot of advanced technologies that I really need for a project that really seeks to understand natural language.”

Kurzweil predicts that by 2029, one of his projects will have bridged the gap between machine learning and AI. He claims that not only will his system be able to identify, navigate, analyse and interpret logical intelligence and human interaction, but that it will be able to intellectually comprehend human emotion.

Humour, sexuality and affection: all entirely computable. Kurzweil has faced criticism in the past from the wider science community with regard to his futuristic beliefs, and his arrival at Google and subsequent interviews and statements have been no exception to that trend. There are a lot of questions that still remain on the tips of our tongues concerning Kurzweil’s pending work: with the seemingly infinite power and resources of Google at his fingertips, the science community will be poised in anticipation. […]