Google hired Ray Kurzweil to build a computer capable of thinking as powerfully as a human. It would require at least one hundred trillion calculations per second. At the Google I/O conference, Kurzweil described how the brain is made up of a series of increasingly more abstract parts.

Kurzweil said each new application is a part of the greater effort to develop AI.

When computers do reach the stage that they can compete with humans in intelligence, Kurzweil said he is ready to accept them as conscious. […]