How to Create a Mind
The Secret of Human Thought Revealed
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3.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The bold futurist and renowned author of The Singularity Is Near explores the limitless potential of reverse-engineering the human brain.
“This book is a Rosetta Stone for the mystery of human thought.”—Martine Rothblatt, chairman and CEO, United Therapeutics, and creator of Sirius XM Satellite Radio
“Kurzweil’s vision of our super-enhanced future is completely sane and calmly reasoned, and his book should nicely smooth the path for the earth’s robot overlords, who, it turns out, will be us.”—The New York Times
In How to Create a Mind, Ray Kurzweil presents a provocative exploration of the most important project in human-machine civilization: reverse-engineering the brain to understand precisely how it works and using that knowledge to create even more intelligent machines.
Kurzweil discusses how the brain functions, how the mind emerges, brain-computer interfaces, and the implications of vastly increasing the powers of our intelligence to address the world’s problems. He also thoughtfully examines emotional and moral intelligence and the origins of consciousness and envisions the radical possibilities of our merging with the intelligent technology we are creating.
Drawing on years of advanced research and cutting-edge inventions in artificial intelligence, How to Create a Mind is an incredible synthesis of neuroscience and technology and provides a road map for the future of human progress.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bringing together contemporary theories and research in cognitive neuroscience and artificial intelligence, Kurzweil (The Singularity is Near) provides insight into how the human brain functions, while speculating on the possibilities and philosophical implications of creating a nonbiological mind. Underlying this analysis is the Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind, a process in the neocortex, the seat of higher brain functions such as perception, memory, and language and, by extension, consciousness. Kurzweil underscores that any meaningful progress in artificial intelligence is indebted to an understanding of these processes and re-engineering them in nonbiological artificial forms such as Watson, the computer that defeated two of Jeopardy's best players. Like Watson, he says, our brain contains no hidden secrets it functions by hierarchical statistical analysis, that is, computing. While his descriptions of the human cognitive apparatus and current frontiers of creating a non-biological brain are illuminating, Kurzweil's speculations that eventually "most of our thinking will be in the cloud" and "we will merge with the intelligent technology we are creating," seem so uncritically optimistic about the possibilities of our technologies, as to become mystifying. .
