We often hear about the eventual robot uprising, especially when it comes to the advances being made in artificial intelligence. Bright minds like Tesla co-founder Elon Musk and Shark Tank star Mark Cuban warn of the potential downsides, hinting at a possible Skynet scenario playing out in real life. But if you ask Ray Kurzweil, and AI expert and futurist who works at Google, what his thoughts are on the subject, he will tell you that we will be cyborgs within the next couple of decades.
During a question-and-answer session last week at the Council for Foreign Relations, Kurzweil talked about the fear people have, that AI threatens the progress we have collectively made and could lead to our extinction.
Recorded: November 3, 2017. In December 2012, Kurzweil was hired by Google in a full-time position to "work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing". He was personally hired by Google co-founder Larry Page. Larry Page and Kurzweil agreed on a one-sentence job description: "to bring natural language understanding to Google".
Looking ahead, Kurzweil believes we are on a fast-track path to becoming cyborgs of sorts, though not part metal and part flesh as seen in Hollywood films. Rather than looking like Robo-Cop, the human-robot hybrid will consist of having a chip implanted in the brain, in place of a smartphone in the hand.
When that happens, we will be able to think commands and queries—rather than asking Google to look up the weather in Hong Kong, we will be able to think it, and get an answer from a glowing rectangle with a speaker inside of it.