Inventor Ray Kurzweil hopes to develop ways for humans to live forever, and while he’s at it, bring back his dead father. Behind him is the support of a tech giant. This month, Kurzweil, a futurist, stepped into the role of Director of Engineering at Google, focusing on machine learning and language processing.

“There is a lot of suffering in the world,” Kurzweil once said, according to Bloomberg. “Some of it can be overcome if we have the right solutions.”

Since his father’s death in 1970, Kurzweil has stored his keepsakes in hopes the data will one day be fed into a computer capable of creating a virtual version of him, Bloomberg reported. Interestingly, one of his novels lays out how humans might “transcend biology.” […]