3d girls turned to shiny robots12/21/2023 Ray Kurzweil photographed in San Francisco last year. Though he's bemused about the fact that "for the first time in my life I have a job" and has moved from the east coast where his wife, Sonya, still lives, to take it. Kurzweil does not do ifs, or doubt, and he most especially doesn't do self-doubt. There are no "ifs" in Ray Kurzweil's vocabulary, however, when I meet him in his new home – a high-rise luxury apartment block in downtown San Francisco that's become an emblem for the city in this, its latest incarnation, the Age of Google. The future, in ways we can't even begin to imagine, will be Google's. If artificial intelligence was really possible, and if anybody could do it, he said, "this will be the team". And it has embarked upon what one DeepMind investor told the technology publication Re/code two weeks ago was "a Manhattan project of AI". It hired Geoff Hinton, a British computer scientist who's probably the world's leading expert on neural networks. It also bought Bot & Dolly, Meka Robotics, Holomni, Redwood Robotics and Schaft, and another AI startup, DNNresearch. And this month, it bought the secretive and cutting-edge British artificial intelligence startup DeepMind for £242m.Īnd those are just the big deals. It spent $3.2bn (£1.9bn) on smart thermostat maker Nest Labs. It made headlines two months ago, when it bought Boston Dynamics, the firm that produces spectacular, terrifyingly life-like military robots, for an "undisclosed" but undoubtedly massive sum. Google has bought almost every machine-learning and robotics company it can find, or at least, rates. It's since been revealed that Google has gone on an unprecedented shopping spree and is in the throes of assembling what looks like the greatest artificial intelligence laboratory on Earth a laboratory designed to feast upon a resource of a kind that the world has never seen before: truly massive data. To people who work with tech or who are interested in tech and who are familiar with the idea that Kurzweil has popularised of "the singularity" – the moment in the future when men and machines will supposedly converge – and know him as either a brilliant maverick and visionary futurist, or a narcissistic crackpot obsessed with longevity, this was headline news in itself.īut it's what came next that puts this into context. The announcement of this, last year, was extraordinary enough. Ray Kurzweil who believes that we can live for ever and that computers will gain what looks like a lot like consciousness in a little over a decade is now Google's director of engineering. And, while he's been a successful technologist and entrepreneur and invented devices that have changed our world – the first flatbed scanner, the first computer program that could recognise a typeface, the first text-to-speech synthesizer and dozens more – and has been an important and influential advocate of artificial intelligence and what it will mean, he has also always been a lone voice in, if not quite a wilderness, then in something other than the mainstream.Īnd now? Now, he works at Google. It's just that Kurzweil's theories have a habit of coming true. Only better.īut then everyone's allowed their theories. Ray Kurzweil believes that, by 2029, computers will be able to do all the things that humans do. But that they will be able to understand what we say, learn from experience, crack jokes, tell stories, flirt. Not just better at doing sums than us and knowing what the best route is to Basildon. Or with the fact that he's predicted that in 15 years' time, computers are going to trump people. With the fact that he believes that he has a good chance of living for ever? He just has to stay alive "long enough" to be around for when the great life-extending technologies kick in (he's 66 and he believes that "some of the baby-boomers will make it through"). With the fact that he takes 150 pills a day and is intravenously injected on a weekly basis with a dizzying list of vitamins, dietary supplements, and substances that sound about as scientifically effective as face cream: coenzyme Q10, phosphatidycholine, glutathione? I t's hard to know where to start with Ray Kurzweil.
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