I don't know Ray Kurzweil. I just asked GH "who is Ray Kurzweil?". An author, inventor, computer scientist and futurist. He's invented OCR and the image scanner. GH was unable to tell me if he was associated with Google. I may not have asked correctly.
It is funny that GH did not know who he is. He could arguably be called one of the fathers of GH's AI
https://www.wired.com/2013/04/kurzweil-google-ai/
What I do not care for with him is his desire to go racing to machine self-awareness and conciousness. I think his current timeframe is somewhere around 2045 in what would be called the Singularity. Think Skynet kind of awake vs what we have now with a power switch if it gets too big for its britches.
I once watched an interview with him where he was asked what is stopping Google from doing evil things with the technology it is advancing and the AI word coupled with the data collections. He answered that there is no oversite, just the culture at Google would never let that happen. He openly stated that Google has the means, know-how and ability to topple world powers, just that the current employees would not let that happen.
I think that tech advancement is a good thing. I think nanomachines will be a great step forward, I think interstellar flight will become a reachable goal. I just do not think that mankind is ready for the merging (biologically speaking) of AI and our minds / bodies. I do not think we would ever be ready as this would require a surrendering of a small part of self to an AI.
I really do think though that the big reason I do not care for the man is his non-belief in a god. Now do not get me wrong, I respect atheists and agnostics. But he often states about the possibility of a divine intellegence: "Does God exist? I would say, 'Not yet.'" This to me is too much of him saying that mankind will create this god and coming from him it would be an AI one. Thus he is pushing for the creation of a all-powerful AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GszOhDkvm9s
Tin-foil hat theory? Probably, but this guy does work for Google doing just that.
As for the rest, I previously yielded the soapbox and have no desire to get back onto it at this time.
GH did know who he was. Alexa had the same info on him. Using a computer and searching Google will always give you more info than GH.
As for the rest of it and as my husband likes to say, "Thanks for ruining it for me!"
I know there is a dark side to all of this and probably a lot worse than my mind will let me beleive.