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One might think that if someone ever figured out how to create a mind—if the secret of human thought were ever revealed—explaining it would take more than a normal-sized book. But such is the promise of Ray Kurzweil’s new volume, which tackles the most perplexing riddle in the history of scientific investigation in a mere 282 pages (plus endnotes). The book might be dismissed on the bluster of its title alone, were it not the latest work from the famed futurist, inventor, and artificial-intelligence pioneer Ray Kurzweil, who was hired as a director of engineering at Google the month after the book’s release.
Kurzweil’s theory begins with the premise that the basic function of the mammalian brain is pattern recognition. Backed by scattered empirical evidence, he suggests that neurons are bunched into small groups, each of which can recognize very simple patterns in raw information from the senses. With hundreds of millions of these units working in concert, a simple, uniform learning method can build up to progressively more complex features and so tackle complicated cognitive tasks. Like our own...
Kurzweil’s theory begins with the premise that the basic function of the mammalian brain is pattern recognition. Backed by scattered empirical evidence, he suggests that neurons are bunched into small groups, each of which can recognize very simple patterns in raw information from the senses. With hundreds of millions of these units working in concert, a simple, uniform learning method can build up to progressively more complex features and so tackle complicated cognitive tasks. Like our own...