Among the stranger things Ray Kurzweil will say to your face is that he intends to bring his father back to life. The famed inventor has a storage locker full of memorabilia—family photographs, letters, even utility bills—tied to his father, Fredric, who died in 1970. Someday, Kurzweil hopes to feed this data trove into a computer that will reconstruct a virtual rendering of dear old Dad. “There is a lot of suffering in the world,” Kurzweil once explained. “Some of it can be overcome if we have the right solutions.”
Kurzweil, 64, has spent many of the past 40 years exploring his theories on life extension and other matters from a lab in Boston. Now he’s taking the show on the road. In mid-December, Kurzweil announced he’s moving to California to begin his new job as a director of engineering at Google. He’ll work on language processing, machine learning, and other projects. “I’m thrilled to be teaming up with Google to work on some of the hardest problems in computer science so we can turn the next decade’s ‘unrealistic’ visions into reality,” Kurzweil posted on his website.
