Ray Kurzweil on Turing Tests, Brain Extenders and AI Ethics

Inventor and author Ray Kurzweil, who currently runs a group at Google writing automatic responses to your emails in cooperation with the Gmail team, recently talked with WIRED Editor-in-Chief Nicholas Thompson at the Council on Foreign Relations. Nicholas Thompson: Let's begin with you explaining the law of accelerating returns, which is one of the fundamental ideas underpinning your writing and your work. Ray Kurzweil: Halfway through the Human Genome Project, 1 percent of the genome had been collected after seven years. So mainstream critics said, "I told you this wasn't gonna work. You're at seven years, 1 percent; it's going to take 700 years just like we said." My reaction at the time was: "Wow we finished 1 percent? Because 1 percent is only seven doublings from 100 percent. It had been doubling every year. The project was finished seven years later. That's continued since the end of the genome project--that first genome cost a billion dollars and we're now down to $1,000.