"As the most important phenomenon in the universe, intelligence is capable of transcending natural limitations, and of transforming the world in its own image. In human hands, our intelligence has enabled us to overcome the restrictions of our biological heritage and to change ourselves in the process. We are the only species that does this."
Ray Kurzweil: How to Create a Mind; the Secret of Human Thought Revealed
Proposition: Anybody who reads, studies and reflects deeply on Ray Kurzweil's "How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed" will never think the same again. The person who opens the book and follows his argument closely cannot be the person who lays it down. He or she, even against their will, if honest will be in some intellectual turmoil because Kurzweil overturns many fundamentals of contemporary conventions on thinking. His title tells it all: He is determined to pursue the secrets of human brains and reproduce these through Artificial Intelligence.
Kurzweil's ideas are so revolutionary that a prior look at his credentials is useful . He wrote his first computer program aged fifteen and sold it for half million dollars. He was the inventor of the first music synthesizer capable of reproducing the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, the CCD flat-bed scanner, the first optical character recognition for all fonts, the first print-to-speech synthesizer and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. A millionaire many times over, he has received the National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in the White House in 2002. The Wall Street Journal called him the "restless genius," Forbes labeled him the "rightful heir to Thomas Edison" and PBS included him as one of the sixteen "revolutionaries who made America" in the past two centuries.
Truth in advertizing: No review of this length can possibly explore satisfactorily the mega complexities of Kurzweil's thought. Kurzweil explores the human mind, determining how it functions, and then relates this to the enormous advances in computer technology. He sets this out clearly in two comparative chapters, "The Biological Neocortex," and "The Biological Inspired Digital Neocortex.""The goal of the project is to understand precisely how the human brain works, and then to use these revealed methods to better understand ourselves, to fix the brain when needed, and--most relevant to the subject of this book--to create even more intelligent machines." Already in his previous best-selling book, "The Singularity is Near," he predicts with great confidence the not-too-distant point at which artificial intelligence will surpass human capabilities, and many computer scientists agree. Kurzweil wants to reverse-engineer the brain, and to do this he begins with an examination how the brain thinks, before then moving on to artificial intelligence and the world of computers.
Kurzweil offers a number of provocative "thoughts on thinking" in introducing his study of the brain. He describes how he has been `thinking about thinking' since the age of twelve and some of the insights this provided. For instance, most people can recite the alphabet, but fail when they try to do it backwards. To Kurzweil this demonstrates our memories are sequential. "They can be accessed only in the order that they are remembered." Next Kurzweil asks that we reconstruct our afternoon's walk, the people we saw. Few can in any detail, to which Kurzweil comments "...there are no images, videos, or sound recordings stored in our brain. Our memories are stored as sequences or patterns." And it is this "pattern recognition" that Kurzweil finds the true function of the brain.
Kurzweil argues that our memories are stored as sequences of patterns." He calls it his "pattern theory of mind." "Human being have only a weak ability to process logic, but a very deep core capability of recognizing patterns. He illustrates this by quoting chess master Gary Kasparov who attributes his genius to pattern identification. Kasparov apparently thinks like the rest of us one step at a time, has learned 100,000 board positions, that is, patterns. Kurzweil then describes how these patterns (he estimated 300 million are stored in the neo-cortex) are arranged in "hierarchies" in the brain
Although neuroscientists are by no means agreed on how the brain works, Kurzweil believes he has enough evidence to focus almost entirely on the neocortex, which he credits with being able to deal with patterns in hierarchical fashion. The human neocortex is the newest part of the brain, the outermost layer, thin, two-dimensional, about 2.5 milimeters thick. It is intricately folded over the top of the rest of the brain, and accounts for 80% of its weight. Kurzweil offers a standard accepted description of its various functions. The human brain has only weak ability to process logic, but a very deep core capability of recognizing patterns. Such is the centrality of the neocortex in Kurzweil's thinking that he calls other regions of the brain--the amygdale, thalamus, hippocampus and cerebellum--the "old brain" the pre-evolutionary brain, the "one we had before we were mammals," essential for only a few functions. But it was the neo cortex which exponentially accelerated the pace of human learning, from thousands of years to months--"or less" he adds.
Putting on his A-I hat, Kurzweil reviews his own accomplishments- culminating most recently in a program enabling the blind to read in all fonts--as they relate to his theories on thinking. Most computer engineers agree that a computer capable of emulating the technical function of the brain is not too far off. Kurzweil goes further: "Ultimately we will create an artificial neocortex that has the full range and flexibility of its human counterpart. There will be electronic circuits billions of times faster than our biological circuits." "Thinking" will migrate to electronic "clouds," with virtually unlimited capabilities. The system will make possible billions, or even trillions of pattern recognizers, the essence of thought--including the emotions of fear, sadness and pleasure. (Kurzweil doesn't indicate whether the machine will have tear ducts.)
Understandably, there has been some criticism of Kurzweil, most of all for his venture into admittedly bizarre transhumanism in predicting he will be able to talk to his long-deceased (40 years) father. It must be emphasized, however, that he doesn't expect to resurrect his father, merely to create electronic circuitry which can be programmed on all his known characteristics--DNA, RNA, personal qualities, quirks, moods, humor (or not). It's a natural spinoff from his conviction that AI will assume all the qualities of a human being, so that conceivably (with a lot of skepticism) Kurzweil might recreate a robot of his father's qualities. Challenging this facet of his thinking, however, does not basically undercut his other perceptions on thought. Kurzweil also takes some humorous criticism for his admittedly singular health regimen--taking 200 pills daily and having monthly blood transfusions. It remains to be seen who gets the last laugh.
The public has already had something of an introduction to what Kurzweil is projecting in the performance of IBM's computer, universally recognized as "Watson," on the television show Jeopardy in soundly trouncing the best human players ever on the show. In February 2011 (eons ago in digital terms) Watson correctly answered correctly virtually every question, including those including puns, similes and metaphors.Two such questions were: (a) Wanted for a twelve-year crime spree of eating King Hothgar's warriors: officer Beowulf has been assigned the case garment worn by a child, perhaps aboard an operatic ship, and (b) In act three of an 1846 Verdi opera, this Scourge of God is stabbed to death by his love, Odabella. (Watson is not infallible, Watson's performance is beyond belief--and right in the AI direction Kurzweil is projecting. It (or is it "he? she?)) runs on 90 IBM 750 servers with 15 terabytes of RAM and 2,800 processors operating in parallel. It's preloaded with dozens of encyclopedias, news articles, internet connections. It contains all of Wikipedia. This data base is humongous, far beyond the capability of the human brain. Watson scans two million pages in three seconds. Kurzweil bristles at criticism that Watson only works through statistical probabilities rather than "true" understanding. So do humans, he retorts. "One could just as easily dismiss the distributed neurotransmitter concentrations and redundant connection patterns i n the human cortex as `statistical information.'" By 2020, says Kurzweil, "we'll have at least in a routine personal computer type computer (power) about equal to the human brain." "...at today's rate of change," he adds, "we will achieve an amount of progress equivalent to that of the whole 20th century in 14 years."
Regardless of how one judges the multiple facets of Kurzweil's theories, he clearly established two indisputable facts shaping our lives. Research, from neuroscience to psychiatry to physical monitoring through such techniques as MRI imaging, is providing new insights into the biological mind at exponential speeds. Parallel to this, understanding of the digital world is progressing even more rapidly, with the "singularity" point-- where biological brain and the digital world connect--not . And, yes, what if things take a bad turn and the computers get out of hand and turn on their masters, as with "Hal" in "2000: Space Odyssey" who goes berserk and turns on his creators. Ray Kurzweil makes an unassailable case that it's time to begin thinking more profoundly about thinking.far away. Indeed, for most persons the distinction between "I" and "my IPhone" is blurring--the computer virtually a `brain extender' of our selves. Kurzweil describes how when Google shut down he thought "part of my brain was going on strike." It makes clear, "how thoroughly we have already outsourced parts of our thinking to the cloud of computing." Clearly it's time to begin to think through the ramifications of this, everything from robotics to the cyber world
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Bernd Vowinkel
Das Geheimnis menschlichen Denkens ist enthüllt
Reviewed in Germany on June 27, 2013Esther&Verlaine
Very thought-provoking, but fails to address the real problems of creating a mind
Reviewed in Germany on March 2, 2015
Oliver Völckers
Brillante Diskussionsgrundlage
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