AI–Long Range Possibilities

For those interested in the longer range issues of Artificial Intelligence you’ll find there are greatly different views held by knowledgeable observers.  At one pole is Ray Kurzweil, recently hired by Google as it’s new “Director of Engineering.”   He believes in the “singularity” and in infinite life for humans.  He has a long history of producing extraordinary devices.

Here’s a short excerpt from an article from  about those who have doubts about Kurzweil’s vision.

“After writing about Ray Kurzweil’s ambitious plan to create a super-intelligent personal assistant in his new job at Google (see “Ray Kurzweil Plans to Create a Mind at Google—and Have it Serve You”), I sent a note to Boris Katz, a researcher in MIT’s Computer Scientist and Artificial Intelligence Lab who’s spent decades trying to give machines the ability to parse the information conveyed through language, to ask him what he makes of the endeavor.

Here’s what Katz has to say about Kurzweil’s new project:

“I certainly agree with Ray that understanding intelligence is a very important project, but I don’t believe that at this point we know enough about how the brain works to be able to build the kind of understanding he says he is interested in into a product.”