Google's
director of engineering and futurist in chief claims the search giant is on its
way to developing search engines that understand and interpret human logic and
feelings.
In an interview with Wired, Ray Kurzweil, whose mission at Google
is "to develop natural language understanding," explains that the
company is making strides towards understanding complex natural language and
with it the ability to move well beyond recognizing keywords and onto
understanding the emotional and intelligent content of web pages and of users'
search requests.
Ray Kurzweil |
"Search has moved beyond just finding keywords, but it still
doesn't read all these billions of web pages and book pages for semantic content.
If you write a blog post, you've got something to say, you're not just creating
words and synonyms. We'd like the computers to actually pick up on that
semantic meaning. If that happens, and I believe that it's feasible, people
could ask more complex questions," he says.
In the interview, he also reveals that he has a target for
achieving that vision by 2029. "I've had a consistent date of 2029 for
that vision. And that doesn't just mean logical intelligence. It means
emotional intelligence, being funny, getting the joke, being sexy, being
loving, understanding human emotion. That's actually the most complex thing we
do. That is what separates computers and humans today. I believe that gap will
close by 2029."
Achieving this level of complex, natural language understanding is
essentially a form of artificial intelligence and Kurzweil points to the fact
that gaining a greater understanding of how the human brain functions -- how it
creates and classifies thoughts -- is helping to drive progress as computer
learning and thinking can be programmed to copy the human mind's methods.
"Using these biologically inspired models, plus all of the
research that's been done over the decades in artificial intelligence, combined
with exponentially expanding hardware, we will achieve human levels within two
decades," he says.
Winner of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation,
(America's highest technology honour) and a pioneer in optical character
recognition, text to speech and speech recognition, Kurzweil is recognized as
one of the world's leading futurists. He joined Google in 2012.
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