Peter Norvig

Google Director of Research

The History and Future of Technological Change
41 minutes, 19mb, recorded 2007-09-09
Peter Norvig

The Singularity is near; it will arrive in 10…50…or 100 years depending on whom you talk to. Peter Norvig examines the value of expertise in predicting the future. Experts often diverge dramatically on the why's, how’s and when’s of a future event. They are just as often likely to be wrong as right. So how do we evaluate the future?

Mr. Norvig relates his findings on the difficulty of predicting the future as a lead in to a discussion of artificial general intelligence. Based on his past experiences at NASA and current work with Google, he outlines what additional steps are needed to pursue this goal, and comments on whether we will even recognize it when it is achieved.


Dr. Peter Norvig is the Director of Research at Google Inc, where he has been since 2001. From 2002-2005 he was Director of Search Quality, which means he was the manager of record responsible for answering more queries than anyone else in the history of the world. He is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Computing Machinery and co-author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the leading textbook in the field (with 94% market share). Previously he was the head of the Computational Sciences Division at NASA Ames Research Center, making him NASA's senior computer scientist. He received the NASA Exceptional Achievement Award in 2001. He has served as an assistant professor at the University of Southern California and a research faculty member at the University of California at Berkeley Computer Science Department, from which he received a Ph.D. in 1986 and the distinguished alumni award in 2006. He has over fifty publications in Computer Science, concentrating on Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and Software Engineering, including the books Paradigms of AI Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp, Verbmobil: A Translation System for Face-to-Face Dialog, and Intelligent Help Systems for UNIX. He is also the author of the Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation and the world's longest palindromic sentence.

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