By 2029, robots will be able to hold a conversation, learn from their experiences and above all outsmart even the smartest of our fellow humans. This is the prediction of Ray Kurzweil, one of the most reliable futurists and artificial intelligence experts. This is not Kurzweil's first prophecy and the others have turned out surprisingly correct. In 1990 he said that within eight years a computer would be able to beat a chess champion, and that feat was accomplished in 1997 by an IBM Deep Blue against Garry Kasparov. And again, when the Internet was nothing more than a very modest connection system between academics, he declared that it would soon become a network capable of covering the whole world. Kurzweil currently works at Google Inc. as director of the engineering department. It seems to have been Larry Page, creator, together with Sergej Brin, of the most used search engine in the world, who convinced Kurzweil to join the staff of Google, promising him ample freedom to develop his most daring ideas. Kurzweil, however, now considers himself almost a moderate. "Nowadays," he said in an interview, "my views are more or less average with those of other artificial intelligence scholars." “People,” he added, “have seen things like Siri, Apple's software that recognizes voice commands, or Google cars, which drive themselves. At this point I no longer feel, in any way, a radical." Kurzweil's entry into the executive staff of Google responds to the need, already felt by the company for some time, to enhance the artificial intelligence and robotics sector. Along these lines, Google Inc. acquired Boston Dynamics in 2013, creator of the quadrupedal robot BigDog, and the following year the British startup DeepMind Technologies. With society's billions of dollars and the best scientific minds in the business, it really may only be a matter of time before robots start doing what Kurzweil predicts. On the other hand, already in the early XNUMXs science fiction writer Isaac Asimov had imagined a world in which robots would surpass humans in everything except feelings, empathy and creativity.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=11208867
