Very strange, at the beginning of his talk Ray Kurzweil says that computers today still can't tell the difference between a cat and a dog.
But in the "Singularity Summit 2006" he said that they can!
"Computers can now tell the difference between a cat and a dog. We are going to be adding a feature to this product so that a blind person could snap a picture and it will tell them, there’s a cat in front of you, there’s a lamp to your left. Your ex-wife is over to your right. We are in fact adding face recognition.
Why is it that we can tell the difference between a cat and a dog now with a computer that we could not do that seven years ago? Two things: pattern recognition algorithms have gotten steadily more sophisticated, and we also have this tremendous data mining that we didn’t have seven years ago. You need a lot of data to train these pattern-recognition algorithms. If you want a million pictures of cats and dogs, you know exactly where to get them. There are in fact three million pictures of dogs on Google. It’s a nice game to try to guess how many pictures of different things are up there. (There are more pictures of cats - 3.6 million.) You can train these algorithms. You would be hard pressed to find a thousand pictures of cats and dogs seven years ago"
http://www.accelerat...le-blog/?p=1254