Google’s Kurzweil Says Robots Will Be Smarter than People in 15 Years

What happens when the search engine giant that buys up DARPA-funded robotic firms like they’re going out of style and claims it will eventually “know you better than your intimate partner” teams up with the guy who dreams of the day when that intimate partner is a robot?

Futurist Ray Kurzweil has been writing about and accurately predicting the future of artificial intelligence for quite some time. Now that he’s working as Google’s Director of Engineering, a job he took after the company’s co-founder Larry Page promised him he would have access to “Google-scale resources,” his predictions take on a whole new weight.

In a recent interview with The Observer, Kurzweil announced that he believes machines may outpace humanity by 2029:

It’s hard to know where to start with Ray Kurzweil. With the fact that he takes 150 pills a day and is intravenously injected on a weekly basis with a dizzying list of vitamins, dietary supplements, and substances that sound about as scientifically effective as face cream: coenzyme Q10, phosphatidycholine, glutathione?

With the fact that he believes that he has a good chance of living for ever? He just has to stay alive “long enough” to be around for when the great life-extending technologies kick in (he’s 66 and he believes that “some of the baby-boomers will make it through”). Or with the fact that he’s predicted that in 15 years’ time, computers are going to trump people. That they will be smarter than we are. Not just better at doing sums than us and knowing what the best route is to Basildon. They already do that. But that they will be able to understand what we say, learn from experience, crack jokes, tell stories, flirt. Ray Kurzweil believes that, by 2029, computers will be able to do all the things that humans do. Only better.

But then everyone’s allowed their theories. It’s just that Kurzweil’s theories have a habit of coming true.

Fifteen years really isn’t that much time if you think about it.

Kurzweil has further hedged his bets as a member of the Global Future 2045 International Congress. Backed by some pretty deep pockets, the organization seeks to merge man with computer avatar by that year. Kurzweil has announced that by then, we’ll all be downloading our brains into robots. If you haven’t seen this video laying out their timeline for our robotic future, it’s…sobering:

Meanwhile, Google has been pretty busy buying up AI firms like a teenage girl with daddy’s credit card lost as the world’s largest shopping mall.

Google has bought almost every machine-learning and robotics company it can find, or at least, rates. It made headlines two months ago, when it bought Boston Dynamics, the firm that produces spectacular, terrifyingly life-like military robots, for an “undisclosed” but undoubtedly massive sum. It spent $3.2bn (£1.9bn) on smart thermostat maker Nest Labs. And this month, it bought the secretive and cutting-edge British artificial intelligence startup DeepMind for £242m.

And those are just the big deals. It also bought Bot & Dolly, Meka Robotics, Holomni, Redwood Robotics and Schaft, and another AI startup, DNNresearch. It hired Geoff Hinton, a British computer scientist who’s probably the world’s leading expert on neural networks. And it has embarked upon what one DeepMind investor told the technology publication Re/code two weeks ago was “a Manhattan project of AI”. If artificial intelligence was really possible, and if anybody could do it, he said, “this will be the team”. The future, in ways we can’t even begin to imagine, will be Google’s. (source)

“The Manhattan Project of AI”…? Sounds fun. Nevermind the fact that many have posited the fictional AI Skynet that doomed the world in the dystopic future robot film The Terminator after it became aware is now totally possible in real life thanks to Google and its purchases…(but don’t worry, the company has vowed to set up an ethics board to safeguard from abuses).

Kurzweil, on the other hand, doesn’t seem too worried about the potential of a cybernetic revolt; it’s as if he has never seen The Terminator or The Matrix or insert movie here where robots become smarter than people, rise up, and enslave or kill us all.

In fact, Kurzweil believes this new intelligence merger between man and machine will replace God. In his book The Singularity Is Near, he penned a fictional conversation between himself and Billionaire Bill Gates in which he tells Gates that we will need a new religion (you know, because we won’t have to deal with death anymore since we’ll all be living forever):

Gates asks, “So, is there a God in this religion?” Kurzweil replies, “Not yet, but there will be. Once we saturate the matter and energy in the universe with intelligence, it will ‘wake up’, be conscious, and sublimely intelligent. That’s about as close to God as I can imagine.” (source)

Kurzweil also talks about consciousness merging in what is known as the “Borg” concept a la Star Trek, where we will all be able to share a hive mind.

Yeah… you know, I’m not really sure what else to say here except, I wonder if Ray will be able to read my mind, because then he’ll know just how much he and his Google-backed visions of the robotic future have and always will totally creep me out.

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