My theory is that Kurzweil was behind the acquisition by Google of several robotics company but it turned out disastrous (the guy has a lot of grandiose claims but apparently pretty average skills) and then they were sold back.

If you want to follow singularity candidates, rather put your eyes on Softbank, who has bought Boston Dynamics, Schaft, ARM, and shares of Nvidia.

I don't know he's credited with inventing the flatbed scanner and also what were probably the best music synthesizers of his time (which are still called Kurzweil!). That seems pretty impressive. But this was all a long time ago, it could be he's been too many years in the writing/talks circuit and has become too rusty for practical engineering.

That was all Andy Rubin.

He's never actually been involved in _working_ towards any of those things, and has no specific expertise to do so. He just follows developments closely and talks about them a lot.

Basically he's just a fairly smart guy who's very afraid of dying.

Agreed. Still, I expected he doesn't really need a job and if he takes one is to advance his futurist agenda, not to do gmail features. Maybe he can't do the work himself but what I expected to hear is he is a leader or at least a sort of VC for singularity-like projects to be integrated in Alphabet or something. This seems... very down to earth.