The World in 2030

The World in 2030 79
Those of you who struggle daily with incalcitrant and mindnumbingly
stupid PCs may think Kurzweil’s prediction of
a machine that could pass the Turing Test by 2029 as ludicrous,
but I ask you to examine the rapidly changing nature
of Google and other internet search engines. Have you noticed
that Google, in particular, seems to become ‘smarter’
every day? This is not an accident.
Larry Page, 151 one of the two founders of Google, told an
audience in New York in February 2007:
‘We have some people at Google who are really trying
to build artificial intelligence and to do it on
a large scale. It’s not as far off as people think.’ 152
(There’s a video of Larry Page talking further on this
subject here. 153 )
And in May of the same year Google CEO Eric Schmidt
told the Financial Times that the search engine hopes to
provide practical advice to its users about their major life
decisions:
Google’s ambition to maximise the personal information
it holds on users is so great that the search engine
envisages a day when it can tell people what jobs
to take and how they might spend their days off.
Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said gathering
more personal data was a key way for Google to
expand and the company believes that is the logical
extension of its stated mission to organise the world’s
information.