Kurzweil believes a conscious machine capable of understanding complex natural language will be developed within the next 16 years.

”I’ve had a consistent date of 2029 for that vision,” he told Wired, ”and that doesn’t just mean logical intelligence. It means emotional intelligence, being funny, getting the joke, being sexy, being loving, understanding human emotion.”

Google’s chief engineer, Ray Kurzweil, envisions a ”cybernetic friend” based on deep learning that can tell you things you want to know even before you ask. […]