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

[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

[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

[MikeBabcock]

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

"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?

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.

It's Official

[Ralph Spoilsport]

Google has jumped the shark.

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.