It was surprising to hear that Ray Kurzweil has accepted the position of Director of Engineering at Google. He seems at the point in his career where he’d want to be independent not an employee, but I suppose there are lots of things you can do with Google’s resources that you can’t accomplish on your own. From Neal Ungerleider at Fast Company:

“Ray Kurzweil is best known these days as the world’s foremost Singularity evangelist and as a prophet of a whizbang, techno-utopian future. However, Kurzweil first came to tech fame as a machine-learning guru whose groundbreaking work on voice recognition and optical character recognition changed computing and laid the groundwork for everything from Siri to desktop scanners.

Now, Kurzweil has a new home: Google. On Friday, Google announced that Kurzweil is their newest Director of Engineering. Kurzweil started at Google today with a focus on new machine-learning and language-processing projects.

‘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 said in a statement. ‘Fast forward a decade–Google has demonstrated self-driving cars, and people are indeed asking questions of their Android phones. It’s easy to shrug our collective shoulders as if these technologies have always been around, but we’re really on a remarkable trajectory of quickening innovation, and Google is at the forefront of much of this development.'”

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The Kurzweil Reading Machine, 1977:

The future futurist plays his computer composition on TV, 1965: