[Nfbmd] Fw: [nfb-talk] Fw: Kurzweil

[Kenneth Chrane]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ed Meskys" <edmeskys at roadrunner.com>
To: "nfb-talk" <nfb-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2013 9:42 AM
Subject: [nfb-talk] Fw: Kurzweil


> Subject: Kurzweil
>
>
> 'How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed' by Ray 
> Kurzweil
> By Simson Garfinkel, Washington Post Book World: January 20, 2013
> In January 1976, Ray Kurzweil introduced the Kurzweil Reading Machine, a 
> breakthrough system that could photograph a book (with Kurzweil's flat-bed 
> scanner), recognize the text (with Kurzweil's omnifont 
> character-recognition technology) and speak the text (with Kurzweil's 
> speech-synthesis software). Fifteen years later he struck gold again, this 
> time a program that could turn natural speech into text. Today a 
> descendant of that technology is Apple's voice-recognizing Siri. Clearly 
> Kurzweil knows inventions: In 1999 President Bill Clinton awarded him the 
> National Medal of Technology.
>
> These days, Kurzweil is better known as a futurist. Starting with his 1990 
> book, "The Age of Intelligent Machines," he has delivered books and 
> lectures explaining artificial intelligence, predicting the development of 
> computers that are smarter than humans, and dispensing diet and health 
> advice so his followers can live long enough to have their brains mapped 
> and uploaded to some Great Computer in the Cloud. To quote the title of 
> his 2005 book, our goal - realizable in 25 to 50 years - should be to 
> "Live Long Enough to Live Forever."
>
> Realizing these predictions requires that science deliver a computer that 
> can think. That's the premise that Kurzweil sets out to prove in his 
> latest effort, "How to Create a Mind." He argues that the brain's 
> fundamental building block for intelligence has been discovered by 
> neuroscientists, that the algorithm for intelligence has been observed in 
> nature and independently invented by artificial intelligence researchers, 
> and that the steady progress of Moore's Law will produce a computer fast 
> enough to simulate an entire human brain by 2020. That wish is ultimately 
> an appeal for a continuation of technological progress - humanity should 
> create an intelligent machine unless something unforeseen stops us from 
> doing so.
>
> Kurzweil is at his best when he presents the reader with his "thought 
> experiments on thinking." For example, he asks you, the reader, to recite 
> the alphabet. Next he suggests that you recite the alphabet backward. Most 
> people can easily do the first but have a hard time with the second. This 
> proves, he writes, that memories are stored as sequences of patterns that 
> can be accessed only in the order in which they are remembered. Kurzweil 
> presents similar experiments that he says establish that knowledge is 
> stored in the brain as a series of hierarchical patterns, and that much of 
> what we call "thinking" is really just pattern-matching and 
> pattern-synthesizing. Of course, these simple thought experiments don't 
> really prove anything, but they are entertaining.
>
> The next two chapters present Kurzweil's misnamed "Pattern Recognition 
> Theory of Mind (PRTM)" and delve into the anatomy of the human brain. PRTM 
> is not a theory because it can't be tested. For example, Kurzweil argues 
> that neuroplacticity, the ability of one part of the brain to take on the 
> functions of another that's damaged, implies that different parts of the 
> brain must use "essentially the same algorithm" to perform their 
> computations. He then cites some recent neurological research to argue 
> that this algorithm must run on some kind of neural "module," which he 
> says consists of about 100 neurons, and that there are roughly 300 million 
> of these modules in each of our brains. That's too big a conceptual jump 
> for many of Kurzweil's detractors, who say that the brain is likely to 
> have many more secrets and algorithms than the ones Kurzweil describes. 
> Over the next three decades we'll see who is right.
>
> Later chapters discuss scientists who are working to simulate a brain, 
> briefly retell the history of computer science and present critiques of 
> artificial intelligence from some of the field's greatest detractors. It's 
> an eclectic collection, perhaps better suited to a dinner party or a TED 
> talk than a scholarly effort; it's also a bit disorganized. The arguments 
> about the nature of consciousness are interesting, although Kurzweil has 
> presented many of them before. His recipe for creating a mind, then, is to 
> build something that can learn and then give it stuff to learn. That, 
> after all, is what parents do when they conceive and raise children. But 
> this is not "the secret of human thought" that Kurzweil promises in the 
> book's subtitle.
>
> Sadly, Kurzweil's in-book autobiography, repeated mention of his company's 
> products and snipes at his detractors come off as blatant self-promotion. 
> This book would have benefited from a strong edit - perhaps in a few years 
> there will be a program that Kurzweil trusts to critique his work. As it 
> stands, much of the warmth and humanitarianism that are so evident in his 
> talks are lost in this written volume.
>
> bookworld at washpost.com
>
> Simson Garfinkel writes and researches information technology. He is the 
> author of 14 books, including "Architects of the Information Society: 
> Thirty-Five Years of the Laboratory for Computer Science at MIT."
>
>
>
> HOW TO CREATE A MIND The Secret of Human Thought Revealed By Ray Kurzweil 
> Viking. 336 pp. $27.95
>
>
>
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