World-renowned artificial intelligence expert and Google’s new Director of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil, wants to build a search engine so sophisticated that it could act like a ‘cybernetic friend,’ who knows users better than they know themselves. “I envision in some years that the majority of search queries will be answered without you actually asking,” he said at an intimate gathering at Singularity University’s NASA campus.

Kurzweil, a noted futurist and engineer, tells me in a rare follow-up interview that CEO Larry Page offered him the job after learning of his intention to start a company to build his long-held dream of an artificially intelligent computer. “Why don’t you do that here?” Page asked him. “Google is quite unique,” explains Kurzweil, on his decision to head to the search giant, rather than venture out on his own. “It fundamentally deals with language.”

Language, Kurzweil argues, is the window to creating a genuine artificial brain, that can understand the meaning of ideas and concepts. “If you write a blog post, you’re not just creating a bag of words, you’re creating some meaningful sentences.” For now, search engines have brute-force algorithms that pick out key words in popular pages and hope that the results, on average, will yield the best information.

So-called “semantic” search parses the meaning and intentions behind words. Semantic search aims to solve the ‘hotdog’ problem, as explained by Google’s Chairman, Eric Schmidt,

“Is it a ‘hot dog’ or a ‘hotdog.’ And, if you knew something about whether the person had dogs, or whether the person was a vegetarian, you’d have a very different potential answer to that question.”

Eventually Google will understand why users are searching for information and provide them with answers they didn’t even know they needed. The education of such an omnipotent new mind will take the vast stores of Google’s database. Perhaps more than any other company, explains Kurzweil, Google has access to the “things you read, what you write, in your emails or blog posts, and so on, even your conversations, what you hear, what you say.”

Google can combine the personalized recommendations of a friend (who often know us better than we know ourselves) with the sum of all human knowledge, creating a sort of super best friend.

This friend of yours, this cybernetic friend, that knows that you that have certain questions about certain health issues or business strategies. And, It can then be canvassing all the new information that comes out in the world every minute and then bring things to your attention without you asking about them

Kurzweil was quick to dispel the myth he was given “unlimited” funds, but humbly suggests that Google is giving him “sufficient resources for a very important project.”

[Image Source]

H/T [Vivek Wadhwa and Peter Diamandis]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A new Ray Kurzweil book is always a major event. And his latest work, How To Create A Mind: The Secret Of Human Thought Revealed, is classic Kurzweil – both infuriatingly brilliant and brilliantly infuriating. Given Kurzweil’s remarkable intelligence, it might not be a coincidence that How To Create A Mind is a book about intelligence – focusing, in classic Kurzweilian territory, on the growing intelligence of machines. As Kurzweil told me, with products like IBM’s Watson, Apple’s Siri and Google’s self-driving cars, we are already on the road to a world in which computers will operate at the level and with the speed of the human mind.

This singularity of the mind and the machine will be reached by 2029, Kurzweil explained to me. In the meantime, he told me, there are many opportunities – from biotech, electronics, and neuroscience to natural language – for entrepreneurs to help build this brave new world.

So is Kurzweil right? Are we really on the brink of reverse engineering the brain so that technology will know how to create a mind? And if so, as I asked Kurzweil, how will the arrival of truly intelligent machines affect the human mind itself.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Here is the second half of our two-part interview with inventor and thought leader Ray Kurzweil (you can see part one here.) Kurzweil, of course, is the technology icon known among many other things for his Law of Accelerating Returns, which maintains that society is moving at exponentially increasing speed toward the “technological singularity,” which is a time when human beings and artificially intelligent machines will sync up to push innovation forward at an unprecedentedly fast rate. We were delighted to have the opportunity to sit down with Kurzweil in Austin, Texas this week while he was attending South By Southwest Interactive — his first time at the conference.

There are so very many things to possibly discuss with Kurzweil, and I urge you to read his books and check out other interviews with him for a more complete look at the man and his ideas. We decided to use our brief time with Ray to get his insights on entrepreneurship and the current web/startup ecosystem — the world that TechCrunch and its readers live and breathe.

In the above video, Kurzweil discusses why sleep is so important (but it’s OK to party and program all night once in a while), why facts are better off on Wikipedia than being drilled into students’ brains, the neuroscience research he’s fascinated by right now, and how you are what you think.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Legendary scientist, inventor, futurist, and all-around tech icon Ray Kurzweil is at the ongoing South By Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas, where today he headlined one of the event’s most highly anticipated keynote sessions. So we were very, very excited to be able to meet Kurzweil yesterday afternoon for an interview with TechCrunch TV.

I don’t know about you, but when I get the opportunity to sit down and chat with someone like Ray Kurzweil in his hotel suite, I basically stay and continue to ask questions until he or she kicks me out. We ended up with such a wide-ranging talk that we’re breaking it down into two segments. In this first half of our interview, watch Kurzweil discuss why we need more young entrepreneurs, how today’s consumer app landscape proves his Law of Accelerating Returns, how education is stuck in the 19th century, why privacy isn’t as big of a problem as we think, and lots more.

Make sure to check back tomorrow for part two of our interview, where we get Kurzweil’s insights on why it’s important for entrepreneurs to get some sleep once in a while, what neuroscience research he’s particularly obsessed with these days, and his favorite web applications, among many other things.

Ray Kurzweil portrait photo credited to Michael Lutch via SXSW.com

Article courtesy of TechCrunch