Ray Kurzweil has two rings on his finger that stand out, he said, one from his Alma mater, M.I.T., the other purely 3-D printed. His watch is also unique, a thirty-year-old Mickey Watch. Capturing the whimsy of every moment is crucial, he says, because it represents the highest level of the neocortex.
In an interview, Kurzweil said, “Because of the exponential growth in technology, machines can mimic the neocortex of the brain. By 2029, machines will be as intelligent as humans; By 2045, humans and machines will be deeply integrated, and that will mark the singularity moment.”
Kurzweil was on the cover of Time magazine, Bill. Gates praised him as “the most accurate futurist in predicting ARTIFICIAL intelligence,” with more than 86 percent accuracy in predicting the future over the past 30 years. His book “The Singularity Is Near” (2005), a collection of his decades-long thoughts on the future of mankind and machines, caused a stir around the world.
But prophet was just one of his many titles, with Fortune magazine calling him a “legendary inventor.” When he was 17, he took his first invention to a TV quiz show and won $200. He went on to found six more companies, including Reader for the blind, and singularity University, an Ivy League school for the future.
But in late 2012, the 64-year-old serial entrepreneur, inventor, visionary, and legendary geek landed his first real job as director of engineering at Google. Larry Ellison, founder of Google. Larry Page is his friend and they have worked together on several projects.
“Part of joining Google was convinced by Page, but part of me felt that Google was the only platform that could fulfill my vision of continuing to crack natural language and revolutionize Google’s search engine to reach hundreds of millions of Googlers around the world,” Kurzweil told reporters.
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Devoted his life to understanding natural language
Earlier this year, Kurzweil was in Beijing for the Future Forum conference. At that time, ding Jian, the first rotating chairman of future Forum and managing director of Jinsha River Venture Capital, asked him what is the biggest challenge of artificial intelligence at present? Kurzweil thinks it’s about making machines understand natural language.
“If the natural language problem is solved, what’s the next big problem?” “Ding jian asked. Kurzweil paused for a moment and said seriously,” There seems to be no other question.” So he spent his whole life trying to solve this problem.
In 2011, Watson, an IBM supercomputer, beat two world champions in Jeopardy, an American quiz show. Kurzweil believes it is the most successful example of understanding natural language to date, and winning the high-stakes show requires a strong grasp of natural language, intellectual reasoning, humour and even metaphor.
Astonishingly, Watson’s knowledge was not acquired by manual programming, but by drawing on a vast amount of Wikipedia knowledge. Computers, kurzweil says, are at the beginning of reading and understanding the semantic content of language, not yet at the level of human intelligence, but by going through it thousands of times, they find associations and beat us.
Kurzweil’s project at Google is to base search on a true understanding of language. The goal is to go beyond Watson and enable computers to actually read every page of the Web and a book and have intelligent conversations with users.
Google has been building its own “knowledge graph,” according to The Verge. To accommodate searches for health concerns, Google has started showing medical information in its search results, including symptoms and treatments for more than 400 common health problems. Google is also working with a medical team to ensure the accuracy of the information.
Kurzweil said that with things like the Knowledge Graph, Google will in the future interact with users in a conversation when they search, knowing the answer even before they ask a question. Google will read every email you write, every word you search and probably know you better than your closest person.
The belief that the human brain can be copied
To say Google is a search company is to underestimate its vision, but what Google really cares about is research in artificial intelligence and deep learning. Google is known to buy almost every company it can find that does machine learning and robotics research.
For example, Military robot company Boston Dynamics, smart home company Nest Labs, artificial intelligence company DeepMind, Google also hired the world’s most famous neural network expert Off. Geoff Hinton, which aims to build the world’s largest artificial intelligence lab.
Google X, the company’s top-secret lab, is working on projects like Google Eye, driverless cars and Wi-Fi balloons, all of which represent the future of technology that Kurzweil seems to be intimately connected with, and he believes artificial intelligence will dramatically change the world.
Kurzweil likes the science fiction film Her because it shows the beautiful emotion between human and machine. Artificial intelligence Samantha is conscious and emotional. Kurzweil predicts that by 2029, computers will have a higher and more complex level of intelligence — emotional intelligence — that can understand humor, jokes, sex, love and emotions, and the gap between humans and machines will have closed.
Some find Kurzweil’s extreme optimism encouraging, others worry. At the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, the topic of artificial intelligence (AI) was also discussed by a number of heavyweight guests. AI and robotics expert Stuart Russell optimistically predicts that “AI will replace humans in my children’s lifetimes.”
Earlier, eminent British scientist Stephen Hawking told the BBC that the development of artificial intelligence could spell the end of civilisation. Elon Musk, founder of Tesla, also said at the MIT forum that ARTIFICIAL intelligence could be the greatest existential threat to humanity.
Kurzweil said in an interview that AI is a double-edged sword. We can benefit from it, but we also have to be prepared to avoid risks. Although we have created nuclear energy and biotechnology with the potential to destroy human civilization, we are not only still living here, we are actually living in the most peaceful period in human history.
The key is to formulate specific strategies to lead the development of AI technology in a positive direction. He says an international CONFERENCE on ARTIFICIAL intelligence like Davos is now held every year to discuss the safety of AI technology and how it can be developed to help humanity.
On the other hand, Alison Gopuik, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said at Davos, “How big a wave will robots create when they can’t even imitate the intelligence of a two-year-old?”
Indeed, this is the argument now held by many experts, including some neuroscientists, that the intelligence of the human brain is unexplicable, and even if it were known, it would be impossible to create machines that could function like the human brain. Since I can’t understand, I’m not making any sense.
But Kurzweil, who has been working in AI for 50 years since he was 17, said he believes AI can mimic the neocortex. In How to Create Minds (2013), he points out that the world is hierarchical, and that only mammals have a neocortex, which evolved to allow us to understand more about the structure of the world and thus reshape it.
Jeff Hawkins, founder of Palm Computing and another leading ai expert, agrees. His Grok cortical learning algorithm attempts to mimic the structure of the human brain for autonomous learning, finding patterns in data and making predictions. ‘History tells us that the best scientific solutions are simple, not chaotic, with a unified organization and structure,’ he said.
Frankenstein’s obsession with immortality
Kurzweil takes 150 vitamin supplements a day and takes a variety of vitamins and dietary supplements intravenously every week. Is it a way to achieve immortality? “My father was a musician, a composer, and sadly he died of a heart attack at the age of 58,” Kurzweil said, recalling his father when he was asked. When I visited China for the first time in 2008, I remember going to a concert in Shanghai and wishing my father was still alive. When I was 35, I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and had a very demanding diet.”
People think that people’s health will have a normal cycle, at a certain age will slowly go to failure, but I don’t believe that. “I think the future of medicine will follow the law of accelerated returns,” he said. “In my model, 10 to 15 years from now, human life expectancy will increase dramatically because of technological advances. It may reach the tipping point of longevity.”
But kurzweil said biotechnology is still in its first phase, and can only be used to prevent disease and delay aging with existing knowledge and technology. The really disruptive revolution will come in the second phase, in the next 10-15 years, when the human body will be genetically reprogrammed.
Baby boomers like him will have to work hard to ride the wave and live longer and healthier lives. By 2030, biotechnology will move to phase 3, where nanobots can be implanted to repair and maintain our organs, making us healthier and smarter.
At the end of the interview, Kurzweil shared, “AI technology is not just a lever to move the planet. It can also enhance the impact of exponentially growing technologies like robotics, synthetic biology, and nanotechnology.”