“When people say that A.I. will solve every problem, they are not actually looking at what the causes of those problems are,” said Shazeda Ahmed, a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, who explores claims about the future of A.I.
The big leap, of course, is imagining how human consciousness would merge with a machine, and people like Mr. Kurzweil struggle to explain how exactly this would happen.
Born in New York City, Mr. Kurzweil began programming computers as a teenager, when computers were room-size machines. In 1965, as a 17-year-old, he appeared on the CBS television show “I’ve Got a Secret,” performing a piano piece composed by a computer that he designed.
While still a student at Martin Van Buren High School in Queens, he exchanged letters with Marvin Minsky, one of the computer scientists who founded the field of artificial intelligence at a conference in the mid-1950s. He soon enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study under Dr. Minsky, who had become the face of this new academic pursuit — a mix of computer science, neuroscience, psychology and an almost religious belief that thinking machines were possible.
When the term artificial intelligence was first presented to the public during a 1956 conference at Dartmouth College, Dr. Minsky and the other computer scientists gathered there did not think it would take long to build machines that could match the power of the human brain. Some argued that a computer would beat the world chess champion and discover its own mathematical theorem within a decade.
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