Google Working on Augmenting Human Brain

Google's recent hire, Ray Kurzweil, may signal that the search titan wants to augment the human brain.

Kurzweil, 64, has spent about 40 years of his life testing life extension and intersecting technology with neuroscience in Boston, but will now be Google's director of engineering, according to Bloomberg Businessweek. Kurzweil will be working on artificial intelligence, language processing and other projects.

Kurzweil, a computer prodigy and artificial intelligence pioneer, is kind of a rock star in the tech world. His book, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, is Amazon's top offering in neuroscience. The book also discusses Kurzweil's experiments mimicking the human brain and creating artificial intelligence. Kurzweil is also a proponent of  "the Singularity," a time when AI machines will become sentient and either rise up and destroy humans or become angelic electronic helpers (he believes the latter.).

Not surprisingly, Google's own chief Larry Page has been quoted trying to harness Google's technology to the human brain. “Imagine your brain being augmented by Google,” he said in a 2004 interview. “For example, you think about something and your cell phone could whisper the answer into your ear.”
 
If you put those two ideas together, could Google be working on more gadgets with artificial intelligence or working on integrating its technology with the human brain?
 
 
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