Kurzweil: Human-Level Machine Translation By 2029

An anonymous reader writes "In a video interview with the Huffington Post, noted futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that machines will reach human levels of translation quality by the year 2029. However, he was quick to highlight that even major technological advances in translation do not replace the need for language learning. 'Even the best translators can't fully translate literature,' he pointed out. 'Some things just can't be expressed in another language.'"

Comments

Re:Ray Kurzweil's predictions

[RazorSharp]

That's almost exactly what I was going to post. Kurzweil will say anything to get his name in the news. While I'm sure he's a most interesting conversationalist, his predictions usually make me yawn. They're either too obvious or he anticipates they'll take place so far in the future that it amounts to nothing more than a guess. I assume he puts a lot of thought and research into his predictions, but his success rate seems to be no better than that of sci-fi authors.

Take Fahrenheit 451, replace literal book burning with figurative book burning, and what do you have? Society today.

To me, it seems like Kurzweil's always trying to motivate the scientific community to make him immortal. He was on Real Time with Bill Maher the other day and it was hilarious how excited Kurzweil was over the prospect of immortality whereas Bill found the idea humorous. It's like futurism is Kurzweil's religion: he sees it as the path to eternal life as long as he can rally the scientific community behind his ideas before he dies. So in a way, he's trying to create self-fulfilling prophecies rather than truly predict what will happen.