’What will people do in the year 2050, given the enormous intellectual power computers are likely to have?’: The man Google calls the spiritual father of AI asked big questions in 1991 — 35 years later, we’re still wrestling with the answers

Ray Kurzweil's AI predictions feel strikingly familiar today

04 Feb 2026, 20:05 · TechRadar

Features By Wayne Williams published 4 February 2026

(Image credit: TED)

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Back when artificial intelligence was still poorly understood outside research labs, Ray Kurzweil was already frustrated with how narrowly it was being discussed. In a 1991 interview with Computerworld, he pushed back forcefully against claims that AI had failed to live up to its promise.

“That’s unfair, because every time we master a particular area of AI, it ceases to be considered AI. It’s just like a magic trick — when you know how it’s done, it’s no longer magic,” he said, adding, “Take machine vision, for example, which today [in 1991] is a $300 million business. People don’t consider that AI, but it is part of AI.”

Kurzweil argued that public expectations were skewed not by failure, but by familiarity.

“People usually just mean expert systems when they refer to AI, but that’s just one small part of it. By the end of this decade, most software will be intelligent, but it won’t necessarily be called AI.”

AI then and now

More than three decades later, image recognition, speech-to-text, recommendation systems, and automated decision-making are everywhere, and rarely even thought of as AI anymore. The label has simply moved on to the likes of ChatGPT and Google Gemini.

At the time of the Computerworld interview, Kurzweil was already deeply embedded in the commercial side of artificial intelligence, having founded multiple companies focused on pattern recognition, music synthesis, and speech recognition. When asked whether he was surprised by how computing had evolved since his teenage years, he dismissed the suggestion.

“I’m not really surprised. I’ve always felt that digital information could encompass many types of phenomena — from sound, speech and music to pictures and three-dimensional objects. Almost everything can be digitized. Even our genetic code can be digitized.”

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