Ray Kurzweil (photo ©null0) confirmed with a statement on his website that from tomorrow, December 17, 2012, he’ll work for Google. His task is related to new projects concerning machine learning and language processing.

Born on February 12, 1948, Ray Kurzweil has been a technology enthusiast and active in the field of computer science since the ’60s, when computers were huge machines that could occupy large areas but had less computing power than a modern mobile phone. His uncle was an engineer at Bell Labs so the young Ray had the opportunity to experience the pioneering period of computer science and write programs since he was a teenager.

Ray Kurzweil is a pioneer in fields such as optical character recognition and text-to-speech but he really became famous when he started publishing essays on the future developments in the coming decades. He’s a futuris in the fields of science and technology and in his books he explains why he thinks that in the next few decades developments in artificial intelligence will lead to the birth of the technological singularity.

Ray Kurzweil believes that nanotechnology is a key to a leap forward not only in technological fields but also in human evolution. He’s in fact a transhumanist because he believes that nanotechnology is one of the means that humans can use to reach physical and mental augmentation, reaching among other things immortality.

It’s clear that a partnership between a technology giant such as Google and Ray Kurzweil is really interesting. Google’s founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have always been at the forefront of technological progress and maybe they also got inspired by Kurzweil.

In his note, Ray Kurzweil points out that in 1999 he predicted technologies such as self-driving cars and phones that can answer people’s questions. At the time, he was criticized for these predictions but today you can ask questions to your Android phone and Google is testing a self-driving car.

What can we expect from the collaboration between Google and Ray Kurzweil? Many people already do research in the form of questions rather than entering keywords, maybe in the near future the search engine will be able to understand the question and provide truly relevant results.

Will Google’s huge computer system become the technological singularity? It’s currently impossible to predict it and should that happen the consequences will depend on its attitude towards humanity. It could emerge as Terminator’s Skynet, the Big Brother or it could be benevolent. It may not emerge, at least in the near future, but surely the collaboration between Google and Ray Kurzweil will bring interesting progress.

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