Ray Kurzweil, a well-known entrepreneur and futurist, probably best known for propagating the idea of a “technology singularity” (a topic covered in a previous Ars Technicast), has just been hired at Google. The singularity suggests that human history will eventually reach a culmination of biological and technological achievement through genetics, nanotech, robotics, and artificial intelligence.

Starting next week, he will join the company as “Director of Engineering,” and will be working on machine learning and language processing.

“I’ve been interested in technology, and machine learning in particular, for a long time,” he wrote on his website on Friday. “When I was 14, I designed software that wrote original music, and later went on to invent the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, among other inventions. I’ve always worked to create practical systems that will make a difference in people’s lives, which is what excites me as an inventor.”

Kurzweil is also well-known for his extensive technology-based punditry (there’s an entire Wikipedia entry devoted to the topic). Still, he’s not without his critics.

“On close examination, his clearest and most successful predictions often lack originality or profundity,” wrote John Rennie in IEEE Spectrum in 2010. “And most of his predictions come with so many loopholes that they border on the unfalsifiable.”

Like him or hate him, Kurzweil is definitely thought-provoking, and will be a force at Google in some respect in the future.