
What Is Ray Kurzweil Up to at Google? - mcone
https://www.wired.com/story/what-is-ray-kurzweil-up-to-at-google-writing-your-emails/
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partykid92
I 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.

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Iv
And 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.

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mvindahl
We'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.

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erikpukinskis
Some aspect of the singularity is kind of undeniable. There's some information
thing that's happening right now, and it's growing exponentially, and it just
looks like it (for all intents and purposes) asymptotes vertical at some
point, approximately 20 years from now.

 _What_ actually happens at that point, I think that's up for debate. Are we
going to become immortal? Probably not. Are we going to have AIs who are
better at everything than expert humans? Probably not.

But I think it's strange if someone denies that it's even happening. Just look
at the amount of information that's flowing around, by any metric. It's
exponential, and you can fit the curve and plot where it goes vertical. If we
were talking about physical processes, I'd understand the skepticism. Maybe
that exponential levels off. But I don't see why there is any physical
limitation on how much information can flow. Or at least: if we hit that wall,
things will be VERY different.

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cookingrobot
A minor point- but exponential curves never actually asymptote or go vertical,
they just keep getting closer to vertical forever. But with a big enough level
of growth it might as well be vertical.

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mvindahl
True. Making any exponential curve look like a hockey stick is mostly a matter
of picking the scale. I could probably create a chart showing how the
population of the earth went vertical during the reign of the Caesars. Of
course, a logarithmic plot solves that issue.

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lz400
This... 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.

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Iv
My 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.

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lz400
I 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.

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someguydave
I'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

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Vinnl
Funny, 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.

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Hnrobert42
Seems like such a profound genius could do something more productive than save
me the 8 seconds it takes me to tap out, "Awesome. Thanks."

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zem
disclaimer: 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.

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girzel
Any 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.

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girzel
Actually take that as a challenge -- I would be interested to be proven wrong.

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askafriend
Try 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.

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sgift
Additionally, try to find an average person and do it again. Most people are
really, really bad at typing.

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pier25
Oh, I thought he was doing more interesting and relevant stuff.

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trendia
“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click
ads,” Cloudera founder Hammerbacher once infamously said. “That sucks.”

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riku_iki
I think relevant ads is super-important problem for humanity: connecting
completely disconnected buyers and sellers of everything on planet scale. I
bet Cloudera has paid clicks budget itself.

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flukus
Ads are about creating buyers, not connecting them to sellers.

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PhasmaFelis
At 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. :-/

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lsalvatore
Autocomplete 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.

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falcor84
> 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.

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sixQuarks
I 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.

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cropsieboss
Toupee does help with that.

Although, he looks much older than 15 years ago.

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bitL
So, a Google Synthesizer in the works? A self-composing one with a singularity
LFO button?

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0xbear
Three words: rest and vest.

