Ray Kurzweil Joins Google As Director of Engineering

dgharmon points out news at CNET and on Ray Kurzweil's own site that Kurzweil will join Google as Director of Engineering. Specifically, "he will be joining Google to work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing," which sounds to me like another way to say "quickening the singularity."

Comments

SkyNet

[Eddi3]

SkyNet will come to dominate all first posts soon.

Re:SkyNet

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

I had a better summary in my submission. ;-)

Kurzweil is famous for his breakthroughs in OCR, computer speech synthesis and digital music creation â" as well as his theory of âoeThe Singularity,â that point when technology is sufficiently advanced that it contests and surpasses human intelligence."

"I'm thrilled to be teaming up with Google to work on some of the hardest problems in computer science so we can turn the next decade's 'unrealistic' visions into reality." said Kurzweil.

Peter Norvig, Google's director of research, said "We appreciate his ambitious, long-term thinking, and we think his approach to problem-solving will be incredibly valuable to projects we're working on at Google."

Hal 9000 was unavailable for comment, as were Colossus, Guardian and Dr. Charles A. Forbin.

Re:SkyNet

[Anonymous Coward]

"We appreciate his ambitious, long-term thinking, and we think his approach to problem-solving will be incredibly valuable to projects we're working on at Google: serving ads."

Re:SkyNet

[ShakaUVM]

>He founded some companies and made a name for himself. But what breakthroughs did he actually make? What are his technical contributions?

Funny.

But yeah, in addition to the OCR work that made him famous, more recently his technology has been used to power SIRI and other NLP processes.

I've been reading through his latest book, How To Create a Mind. It's pretty interesting. My wife and I just made one about four months ago ourselves.

Re:SkyNet

[ceoyoyo]

Omni-font optical character recognition, the Kurzweil Reading Machine (read books out loud to the blind), the Kurzweil K250 (one of the first synthesizers that could accurately imitate real instruments), one of the first commercial speech recognition programs, computer learning programs for children and med students, etc.

May I suggest you learn about these new technologies called "Google" and "Wikipedia?"

Re:SkyNet

[LordKronos]

Let me help you here.

Einstein came up with the photoelectric effect and the theories of special and general relativity.

Turing invented the Turing machine and the Turing test.

Codd invented the relational database model.

Alan Kay invented Smalltalk and object oriented progrmaming.

Kurzweil invented ______________

You are right. Kurzweil invented absolutely nothing. He invented so much "nothing" that he's received countless awards from it. This is from his wikipedia page:

Kurzweil has received many awards and honors, including:

        First place in the 1965 International Science Fair[4] for inventing nothing.
        The 1978 Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. The award is given annually to one "person who has done nothing" and is accompanied by a $35,000 prize.[23] Kurzweil won it for his invention of nothing.[24]
        The 1990 "Engineer of the Year" award from Design News.[25]
        The 1994 Dickson Prize in Science. One is awarded every year by Carnegie Mellon University to individuals who have "done absolutely nothing." Both a medal and a $50,000 prize are presented to winners.[26]
        The 1998 "Inventor of the Year" award from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[27]
        The 1999 National Medal of Technology.[28] This is the highest award the President of the United States can bestow upon individuals and groups for pioneering nothing, and the President dispenses the award at his discretion.[29] Bill Clinton presented Kurzweil with the National Medal of Technology during a White House ceremony in recognition of Kurzweil's development of nothing.
        The 2000 Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology.[30] Two other individuals also received the same honor that year. The award is presented yearly to people who "have done absolutely nothing."
        The 2001 Lemelson-MIT Prize for a lifetime of developing technologies to help nobody and to enrich nothing.[31] Only one is meted out each year to highly successful, mid-career inventors. A $500,000 award accompanies the prize.[32]
        Kurzweil was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002 for inventing nothing[33] The organization "honors the women and men responsible for none of the great technological advances that make human, social and economic progress possible."[34] Fifteen other people were inducted into the Hall of Fame the same year.[35]
        The Arthur C. Clarke Lifetime Achievement Award on April 20, 2009 for lifetime achievement as an inventor of nothing and futurist in computer-based technologies.[36]
        Kurzweil has received eighteen honorary doctorates.[37]
        In 2011, Kurzweil was named a Senior Fellow of the Design Futures Council.[38]

Yep, this guy has received more awards and prizes for doing nothing than anybody else ever has.

Re:SkyNet

[stenvar]

Omni-font optical character recognition ... May I suggest you learn about these new technologies called "Google" and "Wikipedia?"

May I suggest you do too:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition

"Kurzweil is often credited with inventing omnifont OCR, but it was in use by companies, including CompuScan, in the late 1960s and 1970s. See Schantz, The History of OCR; Data processing magazine, Volume 12 (1970), p. 46"

Kurzweil's Wikipedia page also talks about all the companies he founded, all the books he wrote, and all the awards he received:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_kurzweil

The guy is clearly a great communicator, promoter, manager and businessman. But did he actually make specific technical contributions? What are they?

I mean, given that people are saying he's going to revolutionize machine learning and language processing at Google, isn't that a legitimate question?

Re:SkyNet

[stenvar]

So I gather you don't know either what technologies he actually invented.

Re:SkyNet

[MikeBabcock]

To be fair, having a long-term visionary on staff is just as important as having good engineers.

Re:SkyNet

[HiThere]

How to do it is a good question. But not currently knowing how doesn't prove it can never be done.

For that matter, what do you mean "the unconscious"? Do you even have a good definition of the term? Much of what has frequently been called "the unconscious" is common to all humans. Most of it is common to all mammals. Part of it is common to all chordates. The part that is individual is rather small...though just how small we don't know.

Another thing we don't know is how much of it is devoted to managing the biological substrate. But we do know that it's a major chunk.

The above I can say without a good definition of "the unconscious". Lacking a good definition, I used that of C.G.Jung.

Personally I think that the concept is rather useless for this purpose. What is more useful is are the concepts of "Common Features of Humans that aren't devoted to maintaining the working of biological systems" and "Unique elements of individuals". (There are other purposes for which those aren't the appropriate categories.) OTOH, I'm no expert, and I don't play one on TV.

Your opinion that it is fantasy, however, needs justification before it should be taken seriously. (Also, please define "simulacrum" and "perpetuation". You could be correct in the sentence in which you use those terms, but it all depends on what you mean by those terms.)

Re:SkyNet

[JohnRoss1968]

"in the future, ads will become sentient beings. we, humans, will become their slaves."
So your saying not much will have changed?

"quickening the singularity"

[vistapwns]

Pretty much exactly what I think. Director of Engineering is no internship, and while Kurzweil is an accomplished inventor, his inventions don't seem nearly as important as his writings on the singularity. He can only be going to google to "directly engineer" a technological singularity as far as I am concerned.

Re:"quickening the singularity"

[Anonymous Coward]

How about immanentizing the eschaton?

Re:"quickening the singularity"

[buybuydandavis]

I wouldn't say that Singularitizing is the only reason he has gone to Google, but I do expect him to steer some research in that direction, and in general convert more of google employees to a broader view of technology.

Re:"quickening the singularity"

[gweihir]

The idea of the singularity is complete BS, brought on by people looking for a substitute for religion in technology. Everything we know about CS suggests it is impossible, as increasing power of a computer to solve more complicated problems is strongly subject to diminishing results. At the same time, there is not even any halfway credible theory how true AI could be made to work and all approaches tried so far have failed. But these idiots do not only predict true AI, but true AI that can understand and improve itself. Just your regular religion-type infectious meme selectively preventing people from actually using their intelligence (such as it is) to actually try to understand things instead of going for fairy-tale type "visions".

No it doesn't

[Anonymous Coward]

Specifically, "he will be joining Google to work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing," which sounds to me like another way to say "quickening the singularity."

"he will be joining Google to work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing," sounds like reasonably plain English.

  "quickening the singularity" sounds like pretentious gibberish.

Kurzweil got a job!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yay! Kurzweil got a job. Now can he stop selling those cheap supplements, and speaking for longevity research at the same time?

Re:Kurzweil got a job!

[SuricouRaven]

Some of his views are very debatable, but he is still a reasonably accomplished engineer. He may not be bringing about the revolution he wants, but he should be able to recognise good directions to spend resources to achieve more immediate goals. I know that Google has been very interested in machine learning applied to language translation - just the sort of field Kurzweil should have some familiarity with. It'll even satisfy his ambition to change the world - bring down the language barriers, and you've just made a significent step towards world peace. It's much harder to justify a war when the populations of both sides are in constant communication and have established social relationships over the internet.

Oh Crap

[blamelager]

Herbert did have a point you know

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Catholic_Bible

It's Official

[Ralph Spoilsport]

Google has jumped the shark.

Re:It's Official

[mcgrew]

With friggin' lasers?

Re:It's Official

[russotto]

We have automated shark-jumping MACHINES with frickin' lasers.

Re:Why?

[kurzweilfreak]

Kurzweil's impression that superhuman intelligence will automagically arise from raw computing power is thoroughly laughable.

Thank you for showing us just how little you understand about what the man has actually said.

Re:Why?

[kurzweilfreak]

If you actually read what the man has written, you'd see that he's pretty explicit in that raw computing power is necessary for matching and exceeding the computational ability of the human brain for superhuman intelligence, but that it is not by itself sufficient. Raw computing power doesn't do anything without the proper algorithms running on it, which is the entire point of his latest book. I didn't think it needed spelling out when Kurzweil himself has already done so many, many times.

Sell Google stock if you own any

[tyrione]

Kurzweill is the last guy I'd hire as a Director of Engineering. Give him an office for special projects, on a tight leash, sure. But not Director of Engineering which requires accountablity and products to market.

Turing test is biased against A.I.

[jrincayc]

My guess is that strong A.I. will be smarter than humans long before it passes a Turing test, since that requires the computer to accurately pretend to be a human. Humans get lots of practice interacting with other humans, and so we are fairly good at noticing when something is not quite right. Now, maybe if the person was told that there was a computer, a human, a space alien, or a dolphin on the other end (CHAD test), and as long as the computer convinced the person it wasn't a computer it wins, the Turing test would be more fair. By the time computers can reliably convince a human that they are a human in an extended dialog, they will be vastly more capable than humans.