Technological marvels much closer than you think, Google A.I. guru says
Futurist, inventor and Google Inc. director of engineering Ray Kurzweil has some high praise — and a friendly dig — for the Waterloo region.
Kurzweil said he visits many communities and gives many speeches like the one he delivered Thursday at the Tech Leadership Conference, hosted by the innovation hub Communitech. Wherever he goes, people tell him he’s visiting the region’s equivalent of Silicon Valley: “Our community is the Silicon Valley of the Left Bank of Paris; our community is the Silicon Valley of Tel Aviv.”
“Kitchener-Waterloo and the Toronto area really are a Silicon Valley, second only maybe to the actual Silicon Valley. A place that celebrates the idea that failure is something to be, if not encouraged, at least accepted,” he said.
“We have a word for failure. It’s called experience. The only way to make these innovations in the world is to accept these frustrations and setbacks.”
Waterloo’s major frustration and setback, of course, would be BlackBerry Ltd.’s decline. Once one of the world’s leading handset makers, it has gone from selling more than 12 million handsets each quarter to about 700,000, after it was dethroned by Apple Inc.’s iPhone.
But if Kurzweil is right, we shouldn’t worry too much about such things, since new technological wonders — including indefinitely prolonged life — are much closer than most people think.
Kurzweil has a long and colourful resume. He invented the flatbed scanner, the text-to-speech machine and the musical synthesizer, making the first one capable of reproducing the sounds of musical instruments like the grand piano.
Lately, he is best known as a public intellectual, writing best-selling books such as The Singularity is Near and How to Create a Mind that make predictions about advances in artificial intelligence and human health. He has made accurate predictions on topics ranging from growth in Internet usage and wireless communications, pegging his accuracy rate at 86 per cent (a figure disputed by critics).
That track record makes people more willing to listen to the predictions he’s making now, many of which sound more like the plot of a science fiction movie than reality.
Kurzweil believes that two decades from now, our bloodstreams will be filled with robots the size of blood cells fighting diseases and improving our cognitive functions, allowing humans to radically extend their life spans.
By 2029, he predicts humans will be unable to tell if they are conversing with a machine or another human, known as the Turing test for artificial intelligence. Fifteen years beyond that, he says humans will merge their intelligence with machines in an event known as the singularity.
Google, for one, is listening to what he has to say, putting him in charge of a team working on machine intelligence and natural language understanding. Kurzweil said the difference between himself and his critics — and one of the main reasons predictions about technological progress usually turn out to be completely wrong — is that he works on the assumption the pace of change will be exponential, not linear.
“This trickle of applications now coming into practice will be a flood over the next decade,” Kurzweil said. “These technologies will be another 1,000 times more powerful in 10 years, one million times more powerful in 20 years.”
Kurzweil said investors are often frustrated when hyped technology, from e-commerce during the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s to three dimensional printing today, takes longer to catch on than people hoped. That’s because exponential growth curves start off slowly before taking off at huge rates of change.
When that happens, both technology and the value of companies that own and develop it grow at rapid paces, he said. Kurzweil cited Google and Apple, now the world’s two biggest companies by market capitalization, as examples.
Kurzweil pulled a smartphone out of his pocket to make his point.
“This is several billion times more powerful in terms of computation and communication than the computer I used when I went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he said. “I actually went to MIT because it was so advanced at the time, it actually had a computer."