He also joked recently Google is actually his “first job — at least for a company [he] didn’t start.”
Even so, something tells me Kurzweil wasn’t particularly concerned about Google stock options. Prior to joining the company, he was busy writing books, inventing the world’s first CCD flat-bed scanner, and creating omni-font optical character recognition. Kurzweil also invented the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition solution, and the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments.
Along the way, he also picked up a National Medal of Technology, 19 honorary doctorates, awards from three U.S. presidents, and was inducted into the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame by the U.S. Patent Office.
Why Google?
So why did Kurzweil join Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG)? Co-founding CEO Larry Page recruited him after he wrote How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed — a book which focuses on “reverse engineering the brain to understand precisely how it works, and using that knowledge to create even more intelligent machines.”
When Kurzweil told Page he wanted to start a company based on those ideas, Page convinced him to do it at Google, he says, because the “resources [he] would need were uniquely at Google.”
More specifically, as Kurzweil said in an interview with Singularity Hub in March, he was looking forward to having access to Google-specific technology like its Knowledge Graph, which helps the company tie together more than 700 million different concepts with billions of relationships between them, all in the name of building a search engine which helps you find exactly what you want on the web.
Foolish final thoughts
If Kurzweil has anything to do with it — and he most certainly does — you can bet that’s only the tip of the iceberg for how Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) can apply its massive network of knowledge.
And who knows? A few decades from now, we may still be listening Kurzweil and his Google colleagues make new predictions — only then they could be telling us how they helped us to live so darned long.
Of course, I’m not saying investors should go out and buy Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) stock as a sure-thing immortality bet, but I will admit the mere fact that these sorts of forward-looking, big-picture ideas are even entertained at the search giant in the first place does make Google stock a compelling place for our investing dollars.
The article Could Google Help You Live Forever? originally appeared on Fool.com and is written by Steve Symington.
Fool contributor Steve Symington owns shares of Apple. The Motley Fool recommends Apple and Google. The Motley Fool owns shares of Apple and Google.
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