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What Is Ray Kurzweil Up to at Google?
- Hnrobert42 9y agoSeems like such a profound genius could do something more productive than save me the 8 seconds it takes me to tap out, "Awesome. Thanks."
- zem 9y agodisclaimer: i work at google, though not in anything remotely related to this despite all the naysaying in the thread, this seems like a really good use of AI to me, especially if it can grow to learn your preferred/habitual speech patterns. if you type "awesome. thanks." a lot in reply to emails, why should a tool not make that a one-click operation for you? canned email replies does sound like a very unambitious/unexciting arena to develop this technology in, but the basic idea of AI working with you as a sort of surgeon's assistant who puts the right instrument in your hands just when you need it excites me just as much as the sexier "100% autonomous everything" applications.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Noos 9y agoBecause there will be times when you don't want to say "awesome, thanks," and now you have to strip the email clean, and be sure to catch it. And who knows what other quirks the AI might mirror, like poor grammar, misspelling, etc.
- zem 9y agobut that's the point; it doesn't insert anything into the email for you. it just provides a simple button click to say that, making the common case easier.
- sp332 9y agoBut it's always living in the past. It would be more useful if I could adjust or direct it more purposefully.
- girzel 9y agoAny reply which is brief and generic enough for an AI to write it for me can be written in a short enough time that finding the mouse and clicking the appropriate button won't save me any appreciable effort.
- girzel 9y agoActually take that as a challenge -- I would be interested to be proven wrong.
- askafriend 9y agoTry it on a mobile device then - the most popular computing platform type on the planet. Then try to do it while getting off of a subway after work.
- sgift 9y agoAdditionally, try to find an average person and do it again. Most people are really, really bad at typing.
- pier25 9y agoOh, I thought he was doing more interesting and relevant stuff.
- trendia 9y ago“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” Cloudera founder Hammerbacher once infamously said. “That sucks.”
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoAt first I was faintly disappointed. Then it got worse: > He likes the idea of having AI pitch in anytime you’re typing, a bit like an omnipresent, smarter version of Google’s search autocomplete. “You could have similar technology to help you compose documents or emails by giving you suggestions of how to complete your sentence,” Kurzweil says. So he's actually helping Google get creepier and more omnipresent. :-/
- randcraw 9y agoMicrosoft's Clippy the paperclip is BAAAA-AAACK!
- lsalvatore 9y agoAutocomplete while I'm searching has become quite distracting when I want to search for something with more than 5 words. You have to search with your eyes closed. I could never imagine this "intelligence" (it's literally just pattern matching) popping up in my inbox.
- falcor84 9y ago> I could never imagine this "intelligence" (it's literally just pattern matching) ... Arguably (and this is exactly what Kurzweill says in his books) intelligence is entirely "just" pattern matching on a large scale.
- lz400 9y agoThis... looks surprisingly unambitious for somebody like Kurzweil, who thinks a computer will pass the Turing test in 12 years and we'll all be immortal gods in 30. I'd have expected he'd be doing "moonshot" stuff.
- Iv 9y agoMy theory is that Kurzweil was behind the acquisition by Google of several robotics company but it turned out disastrous (the guy has a lot of grandiose claims but apparently pretty average skills) and then they were sold back. If you want to follow singularity candidates, rather put your eyes on Softbank, who has bought Boston Dynamics, Schaft, ARM, and shares of Nvidia.
- lz400 9y agoI don't know he's credited with inventing the flatbed scanner and also what were probably the best music synthesizers of his time (which are still called Kurzweil!). That seems pretty impressive. But this was all a long time ago, it could be he's been too many years in the writing/talks circuit and has become too rusty for practical engineering.
- iandanforth 9y agoThat was all Andy Rubin.
- gipp 9y agoHe's never actually been involved in _working_ towards any of those things, and has no specific expertise to do so. He just follows developments closely and talks about them a lot. Basically he's just a fairly smart guy who's very afraid of dying.
- lz400 9y agoAgreed. Still, I expected he doesn't really need a job and if he takes one is to advance his futurist agenda, not to do gmail features. Maybe he can't do the work himself but what I expected to hear is he is a leader or at least a sort of VC for singularity-like projects to be integrated in Alphabet or something. This seems... very down to earth.
- partykid92 9y agoI feel like there's a small minority of people who enjoy elevating kurzweil into a quasi-religious genius figure because of his speculations on the singularity, but he's really just an above average software engineer who happened upon some ideas which captured the public imagination. Easy to forget he's human too sometimes.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- bhouston 9y agoHe writes books that others do not, even if the ideas are out there. So that is interesting and neat. I guess me makes good money doing that as well. The quasi-religiousness around singularity ideas is just weird though, I guess it is a form of effective marketing - similar to "fanboys."
- Iv 9y agoAnd there's also a small minority of people like me who think that Kurzweil is mostly a crackpot who gave the technological singularity a bad name because of his baseless claims on exponential acceleration of paradigm shifts.
- tomrod 9y agoI know people who have moved Kurzweil's claims far beyond the pseudo-religious. Check out the Mormon Transhumanist Association sometime.
- carsongross 9y agoI don't think that that minority is all that small.
- mvindahl 9y agoWe're also some who regard the whole concept of "the Singularity" as being a quasi-religious crackpot theory no matter how you slice it. Mind you, it's a powerful meme. Religious tradition abounds with references to some future event that will forcibly clean up the mess and propel us back to Eden. Some of the most prominent -isms of the 20th century subscribed to similar ideas. I guess our brains are a willing host to that kind of stuff. On top of that, the technological version of the end-of-history cult has the added attraction of whispering into our ears that maybe we .. as programmers and masters of the machine .. may just be able place ourselves on the right side of history and become immortal citizens in future tech utopia. A pantheon of gods, for all practical purposes. That's a seducing idea.
- someguydave 9y agoI'm certain he is up to at least two things: 1) getting paid 2) lending the credibility of his name to whatever google is up to
- Vinnl 9y agoFunny, I always interpreted it as Google lending the credibility of their name to whatever Kurzweil says. I guess it's a win-win for both of them.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- sixQuarks 9y agoI understand the criticism against Ray Kurzweil, I'm not convinced one way or the other, but I don't think a lot of people know that he has written in-depth about anti-aging and by looking at his photos - he definitely doesn't look his age, and in fact seems to have gotten younger in recent years. So, at least it seems like his anti-aging research may be right.
- cropsieboss 9y agoToupee does help with that. Although, he looks much older than 15 years ago.
- 0xbear 9y agoThree words: rest and vest.
- bitL 9y agoSo, a Google Synthesizer in the works? A self-composing one with a singularity LFO button?