I don't know. Ray Kurzweil has already revolutionized multiple areas of human endevour. I believe he did a lot of the foundational work around digital audio sampling, which led to electronic music synthesizers that accurately mimic instruments. He also invented a lot of the basic OCR (optical character recognition) technology. His web site has a robotic person with a synthesized voice on it that you can interact with.
We routinely interact with voice response systems that are able to understand our speech. In 1985 a friend who was an AI research PhD at a university told me that that 'might never be possible'.
I think the track record of Dr. Kurzweil is pretty impressive and I would not bet against him.
Huh? How about any person who has seen Blade Runner. After all, while genetically engineered and grown in vats the replicants were people, with intelligence, feeling, emotion and sensation. Would you support NOT extending rights to such people? Based on what ideology? Conservatism? I don't think so.
Maybe he was basing his conclusions on projected CPU speeds and memory limitations, rather than software design.
Is the word "understand" appropriate here? Again, that is an anthropromorphism. I would prefer "convert".