Technology
By 2029, computers will surpass us in intelligence, tell stories and joke, says a well-known futurist.
Moreover, in 15 years, robots and computers will understand us better than we understand ourselves.
Ray Kurzweil, Google's chief technology officer, which also develops artificial intelligence, has made predictions in the past about where technology is heading.
In 1990, he claimed that the computer would be able to beat the world chess champion in 1998, which is what happened when IBM's Deep Blue computer played against Garry Kasparov in 1997.
Read also: Five reasons to be afraid of robots
When the Internet was just a tiny network used by a small team of researchers, he envisioned that it would soon connect the whole world.
Turing test
Now, the futurist claims that in just 15 years, robots will surpass us by passing the so-called Turing test, which will show intelligence equal to that of humans.
· The Turing test was developed by English mathematician Alan Turing to determine whether a computer can think like a human brain.
· In an attempt to resolve a debate about how to define “thinking,” Turing developed a test to answer the question “Can machines think?”
· The test is quite simple: the judge (human) is isolated and must distinguish between a computer and a person, depending on the answers to the questions he asks them. The success of a computer is determined if it is mistaken for a person.
Artificial intelligence
Kurzweil believes that language will be the key, and he wants to teach computers to read.
Google organizes and processes the world's information, and its specialists intend to force computers to read everything that exists on the Internet and in books so that they can enter into reasonable dialogue with the user and answer their questions.
Ray Kurzweil is best known for his singularity theory, which states that in the future there will be a time when humans and computers will merge.