Aggregated News

Google engineering director Ray Kurzweil is, undoubtedly, one of the most accomplished men of our time. The relentless inventor — whose credits include the flatbed scanner, optical character resolution and speech-to-text- systems — is also a bestselling author, a successful entrepreneur, and an artificial intelligence pioneer.

His current title at Google, then, always seemed a little puzzling to me — after all, wasn’t he the sort of guy to set his sights on something a little higher than juicing sales of online advertisements at the world's biggest Web search engine?

But the Google gig is much more than that, as I found out at a recent talk Kurzweil gave to group of tech luminaries. The event was connected to his being named as one of SVForum’s visionary award winners, an impressive group which includes Elon Musk and Bill Gates.

Kurzweil was light on specifics during the talk, in which he was interviewed by venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. However, it was an interesting look at what Google’s long-term vision is — it’s not just a search...