Tech

Ray Kurzweil: Computers Will Behave Like Real People By 2029

In 1990, futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted that a computer would win a game of chess against a human by 1998. His prediction came true on May 11, 1997, when IBM’s Deep Blue defeated the world chess champion Garry Kasparov.

More recently, Kurzweil, who now works for Google, shared a new prediction: within 15 years, computers will “outsmart” humans and interact with us like real people. They’ll learn from experience, they’ll tell jokes, and they’ll converse just as we do.

In an interview with The Guardian, Kurzweil invokes current technologies like iPhone’s Siri and Google’s self-driving cars as precursors to what we can look forward to in the future. “My views are not radical any more. I’ve actually stayed consistent,” he said, “It’s the rest of the world that’s changing its view.”

Given some of their recent acquisitions, including Boston Dynamics (the makers of Big Dog and other horrifying robots), if somebody’s going to usher in the robot apocalypse create a true artificial intelligence, it’d might as well be Google.

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Rob Schwarz

Writer, blogger, and part-time peddler of mysterious tales. Editor-in-chief of Stranger Dimensions.