If Ray Kurzweil is right, computers will be smarter than humans 15 years from now. It’s called “technological singularity” and a big part of his job at Google is making sure that vision becomes reality.
Kurzweil, an inventor and futurist that became Google’s Director of Engineering in late 2012, recently told the Guardian that his sole job at Google is to make the company’s computers as smart as humans — smarter, actually — when it comes to natural language understanding.
Anyone in the search industry should have no trouble seeing the implications of what Kurzweil and his team are doing. Consider his quote here about trying to make Google’s computers smarter than IBM’s Watson:
The bolding at the end there is mine. That idea of understanding the meaning of web documents should sound familiar: Google’s Hummingbird algorithm is all about finding the meaning behind words in search queries and words on web pages/documents.
Here’s Kurzweil explaining how his work at Google will change search:
Google is already doing “intelligent dialogue” with searchers, albeit in a limited fashion. It’s what that conversational search feature announced last year is all about. You can ask Google, “How old is Barack Obama?” and get the answer, then follow-up with something like “How tall is he?” and Google understands that you’re still referring to Obama. It’s also evident in Google weather searches, as I showed just a couple weeks ago:
If you haven’t read the full Guardian article yet, I’d block aside 10 minutes to read it. It doesn’t specifically discuss Google search too often, but the implications of Kurzweil’s work on Google search are obvious — and important to anyone working in the search industry.
(Kurzweil image by Humanity+ and used under Creative Commons license.)
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