There was an odd but interesting combination of fireside chats at DEMO Fall this year: Ray Kurzweil and Ev Williams both took the stage over the course of the 2.5 day event in Santa Clara, CA.

Says Ray in a response to the question of why natural language processing has taken so long to advance: “You have to take a hierarchical approach just like human language — you have to build it that way. We learn things layer by layer and we have to educate our synthetic neocortices too.” […]