Google also has been acquiring talented roboticists in similar fashion. It picked up machine learning expert Professor Geoffrey Hinton, who coinvented the backpropagation and contrastive divergence training algorithms for neural networks.

Ray Kurzweil is among Google’s recent robotics-aimed additions. Ray Kurzweil, a famed proponent of a coming converged of artificial intelligence and humanity, was hired as a “Director of Engineering” at Google. […]