Famed Futurist Ray Kurzweil, Responsible for the Singularity Theory, Joins Google

Google has its fair share of “celebrity” employees, people like Vint Cerf, one of the inventors of the TCP/IP stack that powers the internet.

Now, it adds another employee to the list – renowned inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil is joining the company to work on machine learning and language processing methods.

He'll be joining as Director of Engineering this Monday, he announced. He has been involved with machine learning from an early age and has invented several technologies, but he is best known as futurist.

He's responsible for the Singularity theory which argues that the current technological improvements are developing at such a pace that there will be a moment in time, the singularity, when technology will simply start improving itself, beyond which point we can't predict what will happen.

“In 1999, I said that in about a decade we would see technologies such as self-driving cars and mobile phones that could answer your questions, and people criticized these predictions as unrealistic,” Kurzweil explained.

“Fast forward a decade — Google has demonstrated self-driving cars, and people are indeed asking questions of their Android phones,” he said of his decision to join Google.