a book
How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed
Ray Kurzweil · 2012 · 352 pages
'Ray Kurzweil is the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence.' Bill Gates
In How to Create a Mind, Ray Kurzweil offers a provocative exploration of the most important project in human-machine civilisation: reverse engineering the brain to understand precisely how it works and using that knowledge to create even more intelligent machines. Kurzweil explores how the brain functions, how the mind emerges from the brain, and the implications of vastly increasing the powers of our intelligence in addressing the world’s problems. He thoughtfully examines emotional and moral intelligence and the origins of consciousness and envisions the radical - arguably inevitable - future of our merging with the intelligent technology we are creating.
recommended by 3 people
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Andrej Karpathy
“Kurzweil's book offers an overview of the biological brain and briefly overviews some attempts toward replicating its structure or function inside the computer. He also offers his own high-level ideas that are mostly a restatement of what can already be found in other books (such as Hawkins' On Intelligence) with a few modifications (he admits this himself though at one point, for which he gets bonus points). Finally, he applies his Law Of Accelerating Returns (LOAR) to field of AI and produces some predictions for the future of this field. The good: Nice thought experiments section, nice overview of the biological brain (both old brain/cortex and their function), reasonably ok philosophical mambo jambo parts about consciousness and whether it is possible for a computer to be a mind (if you're into that), some analysis of relevant computational trends. By the end, you're almost convinced we're almost there! The bad: First, his own theories are extremely vague and half-baked (though I forgive this. If he knew more he would be busier with things other than writing this book) and essentially reduce to some form of Hierarchical Hidden Markov Model. That's not especially exciting, I think most researchers in the field will agree on such high-level things. I also find it puzzling that he claims to be talking about the mind in its entirety, but then his exposition focuses almost entirely on temporal modeling/prediction aspects and mostly ignores a lot of other magical components of a mind, such as a flexible and efficient knowledge representation / inference engine, or a reinforcement learning - like actor /critic system that surely exists somewhere at the core of all of our learning and reasoning. All in all, I would recommend this book to anyone who's interested in some pointers to our efforts to replicate a brain in the computer, who wants to learn a bit about the biological brain, or who's into the philosophy of it all.”↗
Amjad Masad
“"Loved that book!"”↗
Tobias Van Schneider
“While working on @mymind I’ve been eating up a couple books on neuroscience including one of my favorites “How to create a mind” by Ray Kurzweil. Any books on neuroscience (and potential artificial enhancements) that I should add to my reading list?”↗