Google will know you better than your other half, exec says

According to a Google engineer, the time will come when the company will know you and your habits better than your family.

Ray Kurzweil, current director of engineering at Google, told the Guardian in a recent interview that he is working with Google to create an artificial intelligence system capable of understanding human beings intimately. Kurzweil told the publication:

"I have a one-sentence spec which is to help bring natural language understanding to Google. My project is ultimately to base search on really understanding what the language means.

When you write an article, you're not creating an interesting collection of words. You have something to say and Google is devoted to intelligently organizing and processing the world's information. The message in your article is information, and the computers are not picking up on that. So we would want them to read everything on the web and every page of every book, then be able to engage in intelligent dialogue with the user to be able to answer their questions."

The 66-year-old, who Bill gates called "the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence," believes that eventually the tech giant will not only know the answer to a question before you've asked it, but will also have recorded and analyzed every document, email, and search time -- based on your thoughts -- you have ever input. As a result, Google may end up knowing you better than your other half does.

Google has been on a recent acquisition spree in the realm of robotics and artificial intelligence. Two months ago, Google purchased military robot developer Boston Dynamics, adding the firm to its portfolio comprising of Bot & Dolly, Meka Robotics, Holomni, Redwood Robotics and Schaft, and DNNresearch. In addition, Google recently bought the secretive U.K. artificial intelligence startup DeepMind.

Via: The Guardian 

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com