How to Create a Mind
The Secret of Human Thought Revealed
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- USD 9.99
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- USD 9.99
Publisher Description
How does the brain recognise images? Could computers drive? How is it possible for man-made programs to beat the worlds best chess players?
In this fascinating look into the human mind, Ray Kurzweil relates the advanced brain processes we take for granted in our everyday lives, our sense of self and intellect and explains how artificial intelligence, once only the province of science fiction, is rapidly catching up.
Effortlessly unravelling such key areas as love, learning and logic, he shows how the building blocks for our future machines exist underneath. Kurzweil examines the radical possibilities of a world in which humans and intelligent machines could live side by side.
‘Ray Kurzweil is the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence.’ Bill Gates
‘Kurzweil knows a lot about new technology and he knows how to make it sound fun. He is dazzling in his enthusiasm for things to come, and has a grasp of the exciting developments pulsing through the intersection of science and technology.’ Financial Times
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. .
