What Is Ray Kurzweil Up to at Google?

https://www.wired.com/story/what-is-ray-kurzweil-up-to-at-google-writing-your-emails/

by mcone • 9 years ago

40 54 9 years ago

Hnrobert42• 9 years ago

Seems like such a profound genius could do something more productive than save me the 8 seconds it takes me to tap out, "Awesome. Thanks."

zem2• 9 years ago

disclaimer: i work at google, though not in anything remotely related to this

despite all the naysaying in the thread, this seems like a really good use of AI to me, especially if it can grow to learn your preferred/habitual speech patterns. if you type "awesome. thanks." a lot in reply to emails, why should a tool not make that a one-click operation for you? canned email replies does sound like a very unambitious/unexciting arena to develop this technology in, but the basic idea of AI working with you as a sort of surgeon's assistant who puts the right instrument in your hands just when you need it excites me just as much as the sexier "100% autonomous everything" applications.

Noos• 9 years ago

Because there will be times when you don't want to say "awesome, thanks," and now you have to strip the email clean, and be sure to catch it. And who knows what other quirks the AI might mirror, like poor grammar, misspelling, etc.

sp332• 9 years ago

But it's always living in the past. It would be more useful if I could adjust or direct it more purposefully.

girzel2• 9 years ago

Any reply which is brief and generic enough for an AI to write it for me can be written in a short enough time that finding the mouse and clicking the appropriate button won't save me any appreciable effort.

pier25• 9 years ago

Oh, I thought he was doing more interesting and relevant stuff.

trendia• 9 years ago

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” Cloudera founder Hammerbacher once infamously said. “That sucks.”

riku_iki• 9 years ago

I think relevant ads is super-important problem for humanity: connecting completely disconnected buyers and sellers of everything on planet scale. I bet Cloudera has paid clicks budget itself.

PhasmaFelis• 9 years ago

At first I was faintly disappointed. Then it got worse:

He likes the idea of having AI pitch in anytime you’re typing, a bit like an omnipresent, smarter version of Google’s search autocomplete. “You could have similar technology to help you compose documents or emails by giving you suggestions of how to complete your sentence,” Kurzweil says.

So he's actually helping Google get creepier and more omnipresent. :-/

lsalvatore• 9 years ago

Autocomplete while I'm searching has become quite distracting when I want to search for something with more than 5 words. You have to search with your eyes closed. I could never imagine this "intelligence" (it's literally just pattern matching) popping up in my inbox.

falcor84• 9 years ago

I could never imagine this "intelligence" (it's literally just pattern matching) ...

Arguably (and this is exactly what Kurzweill says in his books) intelligence is entirely "just" pattern matching on a large scale.

lz4003• 9 years ago

This... looks surprisingly unambitious for somebody like Kurzweil, who thinks a computer will pass the Turing test in 12 years and we'll all be immortal gods in 30. I'd have expected he'd be doing "moonshot" stuff.

Iv6• 9 years ago

My theory is that Kurzweil was behind the acquisition by Google of several robotics company but it turned out disastrous (the guy has a lot of grandiose claims but apparently pretty average skills) and then they were sold back.

If you want to follow singularity candidates, rather put your eyes on Softbank, who has bought Boston Dynamics, Schaft, ARM, and shares of Nvidia.

lz4003• 9 years ago

I don't know he's credited with inventing the flatbed scanner and also what were probably the best music synthesizers of his time (which are still called Kurzweil!). That seems pretty impressive. But this was all a long time ago, it could be he's been too many years in the writing/talks circuit and has become too rusty for practical engineering.

iandanforth• 9 years ago

That was all Andy Rubin.

gipp• 9 years ago

He's never actually been involved in _working_ towards any of those things, and has no specific expertise to do so. He just follows developments closely and talks about them a lot.

Basically he's just a fairly smart guy who's very afraid of dying.

lz4003• 9 years ago

Agreed. Still, I expected he doesn't really need a job and if he takes one is to advance his futurist agenda, not to do gmail features. Maybe he can't do the work himself but what I expected to hear is he is a leader or at least a sort of VC for singularity-like projects to be integrated in Alphabet or something. This seems... very down to earth.

partykid92• 9 years ago

I feel like there's a small minority of people who enjoy elevating kurzweil into a quasi-religious genius figure because of his speculations on the singularity, but he's really just an above average software engineer who happened upon some ideas which captured the public imagination. Easy to forget he's human too sometimes.

bhouston• 9 years ago

He writes books that others do not, even if the ideas are out there. So that is interesting and neat. I guess me makes good money doing that as well.

The quasi-religiousness around singularity ideas is just weird though, I guess it is a form of effective marketing - similar to "fanboys."

Iv6• 9 years ago

And there's also a small minority of people like me who think that Kurzweil is mostly a crackpot who gave the technological singularity a bad name because of his baseless claims on exponential acceleration of paradigm shifts.

tomrod• 9 years ago

I know people who have moved Kurzweil's claims far beyond the pseudo-religious. Check out the Mormon Transhumanist Association sometime.

carsongross• 9 years ago

I don't think that that minority is all that small.

mvindahl4• 9 years ago

We're also some who regard the whole concept of "the Singularity" as being a quasi-religious crackpot theory no matter how you slice it.

Mind you, it's a powerful meme. Religious tradition abounds with references to some future event that will forcibly clean up the mess and propel us back to Eden. Some of the most prominent -isms of the 20th century subscribed to similar ideas. I guess our brains are a willing host to that kind of stuff.

On top of that, the technological version of the end-of-history cult has the added attraction of whispering into our ears that maybe we .. as programmers and masters of the machine .. may just be able place ourselves on the right side of history and become immortal citizens in future tech utopia. A pantheon of gods, for all practical purposes. That's a seducing idea.

patta54• 9 years ago

I kind of feel the same way. I read "Age of Spiritual Machines" 15 years ago and thought it was interesting. But now I don't believe most of what he says or predicts. Some of the stuff will come true, but we won't be Matrix-like entities. I also don't like how he downplays (or completely neglects) social backpressure to technology adoption.

Edit: His health regimen is also completely ridiculous.

Edit 2: He actually sells his pill buffet: http://www.rayandterry.com/

mrep• 9 years ago

Can't we just get rid of the whole singularity term altogether and just realize it is standard exponential growth that people are marking points on a logarithmic graph as the "singularity"?

kobeya3• 9 years ago

baseless claims on exponential acceleration of paradigm shifts

I'm not a fan of Kurzweil, but isn't this really one of his claims with the most data behind it? His presentations on exponential trends is always accompanied with endless citations of data points that went into it. He has (or had prior to Google?) a research team whose job was to find this data.

Will_Parker• 9 years ago

To be fair, his work in music synthesizers was far more than "above average".

someguydave• 9 years ago

I'm certain he is up to at least two things: 1) getting paid 2) lending the credibility of his name to whatever google is up to

Vinnl• 9 years ago

Funny, I always interpreted it as Google lending the credibility of their name to whatever Kurzweil says. I guess it's a win-win for both of them.

sixQuarks• 9 years ago

I understand the criticism against Ray Kurzweil, I'm not convinced one way or the other, but I don't think a lot of people know that he has written in-depth about anti-aging and by looking at his photos - he definitely doesn't look his age, and in fact seems to have gotten younger in recent years. So, at least it seems like his anti-aging research may be right.

cropsieboss• 9 years ago

Toupee does help with that.

Although, he looks much older than 15 years ago.

0xbear• 9 years ago

Three words: rest and vest.

bitL• 9 years ago

So, a Google Synthesizer in the works? A self-composing one with a singularity LFO button?

What Is Ray Kurzweil Up to at Google?

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