Saturday, December 15, 2012

AFP — Famed futurist Kurzweil takes lead engineering position at Google

Futurist and inventor Raymond Kurzweil said on Friday that he is going to work as director of engineering at Google to help “turn the next decade’s ‘unrealistic’ visions into reality.” 
Kurzweil, an author whose books include “The Age of Spiritual Machines” and “Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever,” said that Monday would be his first day on the job at Google.... 
Kurzweil, who will turn 65 years old in February, said he has been enthralled by technology, especially machine learning, since he was in his early teens 
He designed software that enable a computer to write original music and his inventions include the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, according to the website kurzweilai.net.... 
“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.”
The Raw Story
Famed futurist Kurzweil takes lead engineering position at Google
Agence France-Presse

2 comments:

Crake said...

He is kind of nutty but with billions to make his dreams come true, maybe he will push technology forward in wild ways.

Tom Hickey said...

@ Crake

Agreed. But all great thinkers are "kind of nutty" because they think out of the box, which is part of the job description. we only find out what was actually nutty in hindsight.