Artificial intelligence will enhance us, not replace us

In his 1990 book The Age of Intelligent Machines, the American computer scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil made an astonishing prediction. Working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) throughout the 1970s and 1980s and having seen firsthand the remarkable advances in artificial intelligence pioneered there by Marvin Minsky and others, he forecast that a computer would pass the Turing test – the test of a machine's ability to match or be indistinguishable from human intelligence – between 2020 and 2050. Kurzweil, now Google's head of artificial intelligence, or AI (an acronym with which we've all now become familiar), has subsequently refined his claim. He now says this event will happen by 2029. What's more, in 2045 we will witness what he calls "the singularity" – the point at which human and artificial intelligences merge, leading to exponential advances in technology and human capabilities.