Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ray Kurzweil joins Google

kurzweilai.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 170 posts

Re: Ray Kurzweil joins Google

#71

Post by kanzure »

nealabq wrote: post #70
kanzure wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - New interfaces to replace keyboard/mouse/touch. Voice, gesture, face, brainwaves. Unfortunately, it turns out you can only get a limited number of bits out by looking at brainwaves (EEG). Gesture is much higher bandwidth, and keyboards seem to be the highest.

But American Sign Language is gestures, and it seems higher bandwidth than spoken English. Just an informal uninformed observation, I don't know ASL. And I can't type as fast as I can talk. So I'm thinking gesticulating > speaking > typing.

> And I can't type as fast as I can talk.

Some of us can.

http://www.seanwrona.com/typeracer/profile.php?username=kanz...

Well, almost. Mobile interfaces certainly aren't helping. I am not sure how much I would like a vocal way of typing out code, but I suspect I wouldn't.

Re: Ray Kurzweil joins Google

#72

Post by bquarant »

kanzure wrote: post #60
nealabq wrote: post #56

What's Kurzweil's motive? He's a visionary who can deliver a finished product. I think he must have some pretty specific ideas, and he wants to partner with Google. A few guesses: - New interfaces to replace keyboard/mouse/touch. Voice, gesture, face, brainwaves. Sign language with humming, blinking, and pupil pointing. Works with tablets, TVs, wearables, cars, buildings, ATMs, etc. - SuperPets (r) that can pass the…

> - New interfaces to replace keyboard/mouse/touch. Voice, gesture, face, brainwaves. Unfortunately, it turns out you can only get a limited number of bits out by looking at brainwaves (EEG). Gesture is much higher bandwidth, and keyboards seem to be the highest.

Saving this post to laugh at later.

Re: Ray Kurzweil joins Google

#73

Post by shod »

jere wrote: post #35
GuiA wrote: post #11

Saw him give a talk promoting his latest book last month, was heavily disappointed. Ideas are presented in a way to fit nicely together, but ultimately lack any depth or critical insights. I recall someone calling it "creationism for people with an IQ over 140"; it's a fair description. It's a shame, he's brought many great contributions to our field, but I fear he has jumped the shark a while ago. Maybe going to Goo…

>I recall someone calling it "creationism for people with an IQ over 140"; it's a fair description. Really? Because if so, then they stole that quote almost verbatim from Mitch Kapor when he was discussing the singularity in 2007. And it seems to have a lot less relevance to a book about how the brain works than it does to an imagined singularity. >Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus Development Corporation, has called…

Or the "someone" GuiA recalls was Mitch Kapor.

Re: Ray Kurzweil joins Google

#74

Post by pbw »

Seems sad, I'd like to see Kurzweil form another startup and get bought by Google, rather than go work for them. I assume he could self-fund something, I don't how his hedge funds are doing.

But maybe he's been there and done that, and wants mucho resources from day one. Maybe the AI space has grown up and it's hard to start up companies now, you need the resources and big data sets to do anything significant? Or he's just after the free lunches.

Re: Ray Kurzweil joins Google

#75

Post by mmahemoff »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #15

It's seemed pretty clear to me for some time that Google's real mission is AI/singularity oriented and everything else is just a step along that road. It may not be what the day-to-day view is in the trenches, but it seems like the high level plan. A hire like this one certainly reinforces that perception. I don't know if it's truly possible to accomplish, but it's fascinating to see a major company taking steps in t…

I've looked at Google this way since George Dyson wrote his "Turing's Cathedral" essay after he visited in 2005 [1].

The comments about book scanning led to some controversy at the time [2], which gave a glimpse into Google's AI motivations that have now become much more explicit, thanks to projects like Google Now, Google Glass, and self-driving cars.

1. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dyson05/dyson05_index.html

2. http://www.zdnet.com/google-side-steps-ai-rumours-3039237225...

Re: Ray Kurzweil joins Google

#76

Post by backprojection »

6ren wrote: post #12

It's as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can't possibly figure out what's good or bad. http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/douglas-r-hof... I see what DRF means, and The Singularity is Near did seem mostly a perfunctory literature review, with important issues not discussed, just skimmed over. (For example, he doesn't discussed the causes of accel…

>For example, he doesn't discussed the causes of accelerating returns, doesn't support the causes with data, only the effects.

I agree with this. It seems to be a huge hole in the entire discussion. It's not enough to cite historical data, and assert that exponential growth will continue indefinitely. I could speculate a bit about some explanations. But I'm curious if there are any good discussions out there, does anyone have some recommendations?

Re: Ray Kurzweil joins Google

#77

Post by Alex3917 »

jere wrote: post #45
Osmium wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, that's how good quotes usually work: they tend to be retold time and again and adopted for other purposes until it's no longer clear who said it originally. So I wouldn't be too quick to call fowl on this one. I'm not sure one can "steal" a quote...

I'm fine with reusing quotes, but in this instance it seems like a rather ham-handed application of it. The singularity reeks of religious concepts. Kurzweil even called his book "The Age of Spiritual Machines" before it was "The Singularity is Near." He literally thinks he's going to be able to live forever (and the technology to do so will be available within his own lifetime). Yada yada... basically what I'm sayin…

I think age of spiritual machines is actually the perfect title. The whole idea of the singularity is that you can't predict the nature of emergent phenomena based on lower level inputs, specifically with regards to the future of technology. This is basically analogous to the fact that we can't predict consciousness or intelligence by looking at the properties of matter or even biology.

I also don't see anything religious about the concept. Religion by (etymological) definition seeks to understand or connect with ultimate source of things, whereas the singularity is A) about the future and B) says that the future is going to be impossible to predict or understand because of accelerating change. At best you might be able to argue that it's vaguely teleological, but I'm not even sure that that is correct because the theory doesn't make any real predictions for what happens in the longterm after the singularity.

Re: Ray Kurzweil joins Google

#78

Post by rpm4321 »

cschmidt wrote: post #42
cs702 wrote: post #39

Thanks in part to the popularity of his books, movie, and speeches, Kurzweil now knows pretty much every AI researcher in the planet, and we can safely assume he's aware of even very obscure research projects in the field, both inside and outside academia. Joining Google gives him ready access to data sets of almost unimaginable size, as well as unparalleled infrastructure and skills for handling such large data sets…

I just can't see Kurzweil being in the same league as Peter Norvig. Sure, he did some interesting work a long time ago, before he got weird. I can't see this working out well for Google, unless they just want a famous figurehead.

Here's Norvig himself on Kurzweil:

“Ray’s contributions to science and technology, through research in character and speech recognition and machine learning, have led to technological achievements that have had an enormous impact on society – such as the Kurzweil Reading Machine, used by Stevie Wonder and others to have print read aloud. We appreciate his ambitious, long-term thinking, and we think his approach to problem-solving will be incredibly valuable to projects we’re working on at Google.”

Re: Ray Kurzweil joins Google

#79

Post by brendano »

cs702 wrote: post #39

Thanks in part to the popularity of his books, movie, and speeches, Kurzweil now knows pretty much every AI researcher in the planet, and we can safely assume he's aware of even very obscure research projects in the field, both inside and outside academia. Joining Google gives him ready access to data sets of almost unimaginable size, as well as unparalleled infrastructure and skills for handling such large data sets…

Thanks in part to the popularity of his books, movie, and speeches, Kurzweil now knows pretty much every AI researcher in the planet

Um...

More important question: how many AI researchers respect the last 20 years of his work?

Re: Ray Kurzweil joins Google

#80

Post by orangecat »

jere wrote: post #45
Osmium wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, that's how good quotes usually work: they tend to be retold time and again and adopted for other purposes until it's no longer clear who said it originally. So I wouldn't be too quick to call fowl on this one. I'm not sure one can "steal" a quote...

I'm fine with reusing quotes, but in this instance it seems like a rather ham-handed application of it. The singularity reeks of religious concepts. Kurzweil even called his book "The Age of Spiritual Machines" before it was "The Singularity is Near." He literally thinks he's going to be able to live forever (and the technology to do so will be available within his own lifetime). Yada yada... basically what I'm sayin…

The singularity reeks of religious concepts.

If by that you mean that scientists are attempting to achieve what religions have been falsely promising, then ok, but so what? Before we had medicine, people could only pray to try to heal the sick. Then physicians actually started studying the body and figuring out how to cure disease, fortunately not abandoning the idea because religions had failed to deliver.

He literally thinks he's going to be able to live forever (and the technology to do so will be available within his own lifetime).

An ambitious and unlikely goal, but it's not prohibited by the laws of physics (ignoring the heat death of the universe for the moment). I'll take that optimism over the much more common attitude that accepts the destruction of billions of sentient beings as inevitable and often even desirable.

Post reply on HN