Digital Society

he's predicted that in 15 years' time, computers are going to trump people. That they will be smarter than we are. Not just better at doing sums than us and knowing what the best route is to Basildon. They already do that. But that they will be able to understand what we say, learn from experience, crack jokes, tell stories, flirt. Ray Kurzweil believes that, by 2029, computers will be able to do all the things that humans do. Only better.

Ray Kurzweil who believes that we can live for ever and that computers will gain what looks like a lot like consciousness in a little over a decade is now Google's director of engineering.

Google has bought almost every machine-learning and robotics company it can find, or at least, rates. It made headlines two months ago, when it bought <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/29/google-robotics-us-military-boston-dynamics" title="" data-link-name="in body link" class=" u-underline" data-component="in-body-link">Boston Dynamics</a>, the firm that produces spectacular, terrifyingly life-like military robots, for an "undisclosed" but undoubtedly massive sum. It spent $3.2bn (£1.9bn) on smart thermostat maker <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/13/google-nest-labs-3bn-bid-smart-home-devices-market" title="" data-link-name="in body link" class=" u-underline" data-component="in-body-link">Nest Labs</a>. And this month, it bought the secretive and cutting-edge British artificial intelligence startup DeepMind for £242m.

And those are just the big deals. It also bought <a href="http://www.botndolly.com/" title="" data-link-name="in body link" class=" u-underline" data-component="in-body-link">Bot &amp; Dolly</a>, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/04/google-robots-andy-rubin-amazon" title="" data-link-name="in body link" class=" u-underline" data-component="in-body-link">Meka Robotics</a>, Holomni, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/10/robots-artificialintelligenceai" title="" data-link-name="in body link" class=" u-underline" data-component="in-body-link">Redwood Robotics</a> and Schaft, and another AI startup, DNNresearch. It hired Geoff Hinton, a British computer scientist who's probably the world's leading expert on neural networks.

And it has embarked upon what one DeepMind investor told the technology publication <a href="http://recode.net/" title="" data-link-name="in body link" class=" u-underline" data-component="in-body-link"><em>Re/code</em></a> two weeks ago was "a Manhattan project of AI". If artificial intelligence was really possible, and if anybody could do it, he said, "this will be the team". The future, in ways we can't even begin to imagine, will be Google's.

He's been making predictions about the future for years, ever since he realised that one of the key things about inventing successful new products was inventing them at the right moment, and "so, as an engineer, I collected a lot of data".

In 1990, he predicted that a computer would defeat a world chess champion by 1998. In <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Blue_versus_Garry_Kasparov" title="" data-link-name="in body link" class=" u-underline" data-component="in-body-link">1997, IBM's Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov</a>.

He predicted the explosion of the world wide web at a time it was only being used by a few academics and he predicted dozens and dozens of other things that have largely come true, or that will soon, such as that by the year 2000, robotic leg prostheses would allow paraplegics to walk (the US military is currently trialling an "<em>Iron Man</em>" suit) and "cybernetic chauffeurs" would be able to drive cars (which Google has more or less cracked).

His critics point out that not all his predictions have exactly panned out (no US company has reached a market capitalisation of more than $1&nbsp;trillion; "bioengineered treatments" have yet to cure cancer).

They're based on his belief that technology progresses exponentially (as is also the case in Moore's law, which sees computers' performance doubling every two years). But then you just have to dig out an old mobile phone to understand that. The problem, he says, is that humans don't think about the future that way. "Our intuition is linear."

"My book <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Age-Spiritual-Machines-Kurzweil/dp/0140282025" title="" data-link-name="in body link" class=" u-underline" data-component="in-body-link"><em>The Age of Spiritual Machines</em></a> came out in 1999 and that we had a conference of AI experts at Stanford and we took a poll by hand about when you think the Turing test would be passed. The consensus was hundreds of years. And a pretty good contingent thought that it would never be done.

But then he predicts that by 2045 computers will be a billion times more powerful than all of the human brains on Earth. And the characters' creation of an avatar of a dead person based on their writings, in Jonze's film, is an idea that he's been banging on about for years. He's gathered all of his father's writings and ephemera in an archive and believes it will be possible to retro-engineer him at some point in the future.

And it's the Google-scale resources that are beyond anything the world has seen before. Such as the huge data sets that result from 1 billion people using Google ever single day. And the Google knowledge graph, which consists of 800m concepts and the billions of relationships between them. This is already a neural network, a massive, distributed global "brain". Can it learn? Can it think? It's what some of the smartest people on the planet are working on next.

Peter Norvig, Google's research director, said recently that the company employs "less than 50% but certainly more than 5%" of the world's leading experts on machine learning.

And that was before it bought DeepMind which, it should be noted, agreed to the deal with the proviso that Google set up an ethics board to look at the question of what machine learning will actually mean when it's in the hands of what has become the most powerful company on the planet.

I first saw Boston Dynamics' robots in action at a presentation at the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/apr/29/singularity-university-technology-future-thinkers" title="" data-link-name="in body link" class=" u-underline" data-component="in-body-link">Singularity University</a>, the university that Ray Kurzweil co-founded and that Google helped fund and which is devoted to exploring exponential technologies.

"I don't see any end point here," he said when talking about the use of military robots. "At some point humans aren't going to be fast enough. So what you do is that you make them autonomous. And where does that end? <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/film/movie/88018/terminator" title="" data-link-name="in body link" class=" u-underline" data-component="in-body-link"><em>Terminator</em></a>?"

Language, he believes, is the key to everything. "And my project is ultimately to base search on really understanding what the language means. When you write an article you're not creating an interesting collection of words. You have something to say and Google is devoted to intelligently organising and processing the world's information. The message in your article is information, and the computers are not picking up on that. So we would like to actually have the computers read. We want them to read everything on the web and every page of every book, then be able to engage an intelligent dialogue with the user to be able to answer their questions."

Google will know the answer to your question before you have asked it, he says. It will have read every email you've ever written, every document, every idle thought you've ever tapped into a search-engine box. It will know you better than your intimate partner does. Better, perhaps, than even yourself.

"Computers are on the threshold of reading and understanding the semantic content of a language, but not quite at human levels. But since they can read a million times more material than humans they can make up for that with quantity. So IBM's Watson is a pretty weak reader on each page, but it read the 200m pages of Wikipedia. And basically what I'm doing at Google is to try to go beyond what Watson could do. To do it at Google scale. Which is to say to have the computer read tens of billions of pages. Watson doesn't understand the implications of what it's reading. It's doing a sort of pattern matching. It doesn't understand that if John sold his red Volvo to Mary that involves a transaction or possession and ownership being transferred. It doesn't understand that kind of information and so we are going to actually encode that, really try to teach it to understand the meaning of what these documents are&nbsp;saying."

His relatives escaped the Holocaust "because they used their minds. That's actually the philosophy of my family. The power of human ideas. I remember my grandfather coming back from his first return visit to Europe. I was seven and he told me he'd been given the opportunity to handle – with his own hands – original documents by Leonardo da Vinci. He talked about it in very reverential terms, like these were sacred documents. But they weren't handed down to us by God. They were created by a guy, a person. A single human had been very influential and had changed the world. The message was that human ideas changed the world. And that is the only thing that could change the world."

"Most of whom are accepting the normal cycle of life and accepting they are getting to the end of their productive years. That's not my view. Now that health and medicine is in information technology it is going to expand exponentially. We will see very dramatic changes ahead. According to my model it's only 10-15 years away from where we'll be adding more than a year every year to life expectancy because of progress. It's kind of a tipping point in longevity."

<em>Newsweek</em>, a few years back, <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/ray-kurzweil-wants-be-robot-80265" title="" data-link-name="in body link" class=" u-underline" data-component="in-body-link">quoted an anonymous colleague</a> claiming that, "Ray is going through the single most public midlife crisis that any male has ever gone through."

Although possibly this is what Kurzweil's critics, such as the biologist <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/?s=kurzweil" title="" data-link-name="in body link" class=" u-underline" data-component="in-body-link">PZ Myers</a>, mean when they say that the problem with Kurzweil's theories is that "it's a very bizarre mixture of ideas that are solid and good with ideas that are crazy. 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."

Or <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/mar/17/jaron-lanier-digital-pioneer-rebel" title="" data-link-name="in body link" class=" u-underline" data-component="in-body-link">Jaron Lanier</a>, who calls him "a genius" but "a product of a narcissistic age".