It’s impossible to know at this stage exactly what Google is planning. In 2012, it hired the US inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil to “work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing.”

Larry Page and Kurzweil agreed on a one-sentence job description: “To bring natural language understanding to Google.” It’s a safe bet that Kurzweil is the brain behind Google’s plans for the Internet of Things. Whatever comes out of the collaboration, and out of Google’s recent acquisitions, it will be as groundbreaking and life-changing as Google’s search engine itself has been. […]