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Ray Kurzweil Joins Google As Director of Engineering

Posted by timothy on from the what-are-you-searching-for dept.

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."

4 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. No it doesn't by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:"quickening the singularity" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    How about immanentizing the eschaton?

  3. Re:SkyNet by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
    Never been known to fail..."
  4. Re:SkyNet by ShakaUVM · · Score: 5, Funny

    >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.