At The Wall Street Journal’s annual CFO Network Conference in Washington, DC, last week, inventor and entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil spoke about “frontiers in technology,” discussing, among other topics, recent advances in artificial intelligence — and what they might mean for the future of the field. During his comments, Kurzweil referenced the Turing test and made an interesting prediction (emphasis added):

“Alan Turing in 1950 defined a way in which we can say that a computer is operating at human levels. You have a human judge interview a computer and a human — maybe several of each. If the judge can’t tell which is which, we say the computers have passed the Turing test.

 

“Every year, our Turing test is run by the Loebner Foundation, and the computers are getting better every year. If you just look at the rate at which they’re getting better, the crossover is about 2029. My prediction all along has been that computers will be able to deal with a full range of human intelligence by 2029.“

Check out a couple short clips of Kurzweil’s comments at the CTO Network Conference after the jump…

On the modification of life and the merging of technology and people:

On the many similarities between humans and machines:

And here’s a set of edited excerpts of the conversation between Kurzweil and WSJ Deputy Managing Editor Alan Murray.

Share your thoughts below!

(Contributed by Erwin Gianchandani, CCC Director)