If Computers Are So Smart, How Come They Can't Read?

At TED, in early 2018, the futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil, currently a director of engineering at Google, announced his latest project, "Google Talk to Books," which claimed to use natural language understanding to "provide an entirely new way to explore books." Quartz dutifully hyped it as "Google's astounding new search tool [that] will answer any question by reading thousands of books." If such a tool actually existed and worked robustly, it would be amazing. If we could give computers one capability that they don't already have, it would be the ability to genuinely understand language. In medicine, for example, several thousand papers are published every day; no doctor or researcher can possibly read them all.