Ray Kurzweil and his son, Ethan, are both Silicon Valley futurists—though they have different ways of tackling what they perceive is coming next.

Ray Kurzweil, 65 years old, joined Google Inc. GOOG +1.41% Google Inc. Cl C U.S.: Nasdaq $579.18 +8.08 +1.41% July 11, 2014 4:00 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 1.60M AFTER HOURS $580.00 +0.82 +0.14% July 11, 2014 7:53 pm Volume (Delayed 15m): 13,060 P/E Ratio N/A Market Cap $393.17 Billion Dividend Yield N/A Rev. per Employee $1,281,680 07/09/14 Publicis Seeks Fresh Outlook o... 07/07/14 OK Glass, Go To The Office 06/23/14 A New Face Near the Top of Goo... More quote details and news » in December after spending nearly five decades pioneering everything from machines that can read text aloud to the blind to a music synthesizer that sounds like a real piano.

Among his theories, which aren't universally accepted in the technology world, is the "Law of Accelerating Returns." This states that technological progress increases exponentially, eventually allowing people to enhance their intelligence and live forever. He also envisions a future in which artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence and spreads out across the universe, which he calls "the singularity."

Futurist Ray Kurzweil and his son, venture capitalist Ethan Kurzweil, are both looking at what's next in tech. Annie Tritt for The Wall Street Journal

Mr. Kurzweil is now forming an engineering team at Google's Mountain View headquarters, where he is attempting to use software to replicate the human brain's "pattern recognition" abilities—a topic discussed in his new book, "How to Create a Mind." The hope is to build a system with human-level understanding of the world and, by giving it access to Google's mighty index of digital information, create the ultimate virtual assistant—and more.

Ethan Kurzweil, 33, is a futurist through his attempts to invest in the next big thing. Earlier this year, he became a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, a Menlo Park venture-capital firm. His Bessemer investments include online-dating site Zoosk Inc. and CrowdFlower Inc., which helps companies quickly find workers to perform tasks online.

The two recently sat down to talk about the future, advances in technology and the fear they create. Edited excerpts:

WSJ: What are the top technological achievements of the past five years?

Ray Kurzweil: The concept of biotechnology has become real. Five years ago, there were no examples of success. Now, if you damage your heart in a heart attack, you can fix that with stem-cell therapies. You can get a trachea replaced with something grown in a petri dish. It's treating the body as software.

AI has also become real. People now have seen viscerally what it can look like, with [IBM's supercomputer] Watson that didn't get its knowledge from being hand-coded but by reading all of Wikipedia. What human could have done that? Then there's the Google self-driving car, talking to Google [voice search on mobile devices] or Siri [voice search on Apple devices]. When it first rolls out it doesn't work that well, but a few years later it's great.

Ethan Kurzweil: The realization of mobile computing that enables you to have as rich an experience as you could have on the Web, and cell networks being speedy enough.

WSJ: Do you really believe you can design software that matches the complexity of human interaction?

Ray: We're at the threshold where computers can understand natural language, human language. That's equivalent to doing anything interactive. There have been text interactions where people didn't know they were talking to a computer. Some people might say, "Oh, that's so limited." Watson beat the "Jeopardy!" [game show] champions, and that's not a narrow game. It has riddles. If a computer has access to Google scale information, it can get real knowledge and…can enhance answers to search queries. We're not trying to create human-level performance right away.

WSJ: Are people ready for artificial intelligence that has human-level understanding?

Ray: Look at Siri, look at Watson. People's skepticism about AI is evaporating, though people don't always know what's enabling the technology tools of today.


WSJ: Facebook is changing the way we communicate with each other and encouraging people to share all of their information. Do you think it's a good thing?

Ray: It's very much a good thing. Everyone is looking at machines, but these are just gateways of communication to other people, people we love and care about and share common passions with around the world. It enriches our relationships. It's democratizing.

Ethan: There's going to be backlash about everything new. The Facebook news feed, when it came out, was seen as an invasion of privacy—something that's now unfathomable. It's no different from backlash against any new technology, like when the cellphone came out of the car and people were saying, "I don't want to be reached." Some people don't want to put photos of their [kids] online, but the general trend is toward more openness. We're not going back.

WSJ: What will happen technologically in the next five years?

Ray: My message is the law of accelerating returns and how remarkably predictable the exponential growth of IT is. More and more things become IT, like health and medicine. There will be 3-D printing, augmented reality.

Ethan: Every step along the way will freak people out.

Ray: With nanodevices that will be implanted in our bodies to repair us, putting technology in our bloodstream, lots of people will opt out at first.

WSJ: What's it like to grow up in Ray Kurzweil's house?

Ethan:He's always working on crazy projects, or they seemed crazy, but he brought them to life: a reading machine for the blind…computers that could trade stocks. It doesn't seem as wild as it did in 1980. I had more of an appreciation for what was coming.

Ray: I've been an entrepreneur for half a century. You're always living on the edge. It takes courage and confidence. Ethan grew up with this whole orientation.

WSJ: How have you informed each other's work?

Ethan: I work with small startup companies all the time, and trying to put an idea in context is really difficult to do. They've all built something and at first it seems unremarkable. That was true with Google and Facebook. Not many people appreciated the importance of it. My father's perspective is to think big about what's coming. For a while he was talking about searching people's minds and getting the information in their heads. With that perspective, Twitter makes sense. It's a searchable database of thoughts.

Ray: Ethan's a good negotiator. He advised me on my e-reader company that was being merged [with another company]. He helped me with how to talk to Google.

Write to Amir Efrati at amir.efrati@wsj.com