[Nfbmo] Sorry, here it is Ray Kurzweil

[Ruby Polk]

Google Hires Famed Futurist Ray Kurzweil
»
By John Letzing
Ray Kurzweil, the author and big thinker on artificial intelligence and 
other topics,
announced Friday he’s been hired by Google to “work on new projects 
involving machine
learning and language processing.”
He says he’ll officially be on board at the search giant Monday. A 
Google spokeswoman
did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Kurzweil is best known for his theories about “The Singularity,” or the 
point in
the future when technology becomes so advanced that it starts 
outsmarting humans
on its own. Some of the concepts are laid out in a somewhat wacky
trailer
for his 2010 film “The Singularity is Near,” which features Tony 
Robbins, Alan Dershowitz
and Kurzweil himself.
The hiring of Kurzweil builds on existing ties between the author and 
Google. The
Mountain View, Calif., company has partly funded Kurzweil’s Singularity 
University,
an academic program launched a few years ago in Silicon Valley to prep 
students for
a tech-heavy future and such concepts as nanotechnology and robotics.
Kurzweil described his new title at Google as Director of Engineering. 
In the blog
post announcing his hiring, he wrote: “In 1999, I said that in about a 
decade we
would see technologies such as self-driving cars and mobile phones that 
could answer
your questions, and people criticized these predictions as unrealistic. 
Fast forward
a decade–Google has demonstrated self-driving cars, and people are 
indeed asking
questions of their Android phones.”
He added, “I’m thrilled to be teaming up with Google to work on some of 
the hardest
problems in computer science so we can turn the next decade’s 
‘unrealistic’ visions
into reality.”


------------------------------------

Read the NUTKC blog @ http://nutkc.wordpress.com.Yahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nutkc/

<*> Your email settings:
    Individual Email | Traditional

<*> To change settings online go to:
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nutkc/join
    (Yahoo! ID required)

<*> To change settings via email:
    nutkc-digest at yahoogroups.com 
    nutkc-fullfeatured at yahoogroups.com

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
    nutkc-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
    http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/

Ruby J. Polk
Braille Skills of Kansas City
816-305-9993
Essential For The Twenty-First Century