How to Create a Mind

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed

Author	Ray Kurzweil
Language	English
Publisher	Viking Penguin
Publication date	2012
Publication place	United States
Pages	352
ISBN	978-0670025299
OCLC	779263503
Dewey Decimal	612.82
LC Class	QP385.K87
Preceded by	The Singularity Is Near

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed is a 2012 book by Ray Kurzweil. In it Kurzweil proposes to reverse engineer the human brain in order to understand how it works, and then use its secrets to advance the state of artificial intelligence.

Content

Kurzweil starts by reminding us of the importance of thought experiments in the development of major theories, including Evolution and Relativity. He suggests his own thought experiments related to how we think and remember things, and concludes a hierarchy of pattern recognizers must be at play. This leads into the centerpiece of the book, his Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind (PRTM).

Kurzweil believes the neocortex contains about 300 million very general pattern recognizers, arranged in a hierarchy. For example to recognize a written word there might be several pattern recognizers for each different letter stroke: diagonal, horizontal, vertical or curved. The output of these recognizers would feed into higher level pattern recognizers, which look for the pattern of strokes which form a letter. Finally a word-level recognizer uses the output of the letter recognizers. All the while signals feed both "forward" and "backward". For example if a letter is obscured, but the remaining letters strongly indicate a certain word, the word-level recognizer might suggest to the letter-recognizer which letter to look for, and the letter-level would suggest which strokes to look for. Kurzweil also discusses how listening to speech requires similar hierarchical pattern recognizers.

Kurzweil's main thesis is that these hierarchical pattern recognizers are used not just for sensing the world, but for nearly all aspects of thought. Kurzweil says the patterns we learn to recognize are the same ones we use as the basis of memories, for example. He writes that "learning is critical to human intelligence" and discusses his theories of learning in detail.

Kurzweil writes extensively about neuroanatomy, of both the neocortex and "the old brain". He cites recent evidence that interconnections in the neocortex form a grid structure, which suggests to him a common algorithm across "all neocortical functions". Next Kurzweil turns his attention to building a digital brain which is inspired by the neocortex. He discusses Henry Markram's Blue Brain Project, neural networks, sparse coding, hidden Markov models, and genetic algorithms. If combined properly these elements, along with "a critical thinking module", could be used to create an artificial brain "as capable as biological ones of effecting changes in the world".

The two final chapters in the book return to his Law of Accelerating Returns to support how the technology for building an artificial brain will come into existence in a matter of decades. Exponential improvements in all information technologies yield massive gains in capability over the long haul. In the Epilogue he says "we will merge with the intelligent technology we are creating" and wonders whether the speed of light is really a firm limit to our ability to colonize the universe.

Reception

Reception of this book has been mixed.

Simpson Garfinkel writing for The Washington Post says Kurzweil is at his best with the thought experiments early in the book. Garfinkel says Kurzweil's PRTM is misnamed because of the word "theory", he feels it is not a theory since it cannot be tested. Garfinkel rejects Kurzweil's one-algorithm approach instead saying "the brain is likely to have many more secrets and algorithms than the one Kurzweil describes". Garfinkel caricatures Kurzweil's plan for artificial intelligence as "build something that can learn, then give it stuff to learn", Garfinkel says this is hardly the "secret of human thought" promised by the subtitle of the book. Garfinkel says the "warmth and humanitarianism" evident in Kurzweil's talks is missing in the book.

Gary Marcus writing for The New Yorker applauds Kurzweil for "lucid discussion" of Alan Turing and John von Neumann. Marucus also was impressed by his descriptions of some computer algorithms, and detailed histories of Kurzweil's own companies. But as for PRTM Marcus says only the name is new. He says the basic theory behind PRTM is "in the spirit of" a model of vision known as the neocognitron, introduced in 1980. He also says PRTM even more strongly resembles Hierarchical Temporal Memory promoted by Jeff Hawkins in recent years. Marcus would have liked to see Kurzweil present a computer model based on his theory, instead of just pointing out ways PRTM resembles structures found in brain. Marcus criticizes Kurzweil for doing "thought experiments" without referencing any cognitive psychologists or studies. Finally he claims that "a whole slew" of machines have been programmed with an approach similar to PRTM, and they have often performed poorly.

John Raulerson in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette starts by criticizing Kurzweil's rhetorical style and worldview as "borderline autistic". He does praise How to Create a Mind as "informative, refreshingly transparent and often engrossing". However he thinks Kurzweil mistakes his PRTM theory for a comprehensive model of the mind, and thus calls the result "philosophically naive, methodologically dubious, at times intellectually dishonest -- and, above all, monstrously reductive". Raulerson believes Kurzweil writes as a MIT-trained computer scientist but also as a transhumanist vitamin salesman, since he is both. Raulerson suggests Kurzweil is a figure like Nikola Tesla, not easily dismissed but not to be taken too seriously either.

Matthew Feeney writing for Reason was disappointed in how briefly Kurzweil dealt with the philosophical aspects of the mind-body problem, and the ethical implications of machines which appear to be conscious. He does say Kurzweil's "optimism about an AI-assisted future is contagious." While Drew DeSilver in the Seattle Times says the first half of the book "has all the pizazz and drive of an engineering manual" but says Kurzweil's description of how the Jeopardy! computer champion Watson worked "is eye-opening and refreshingly clear".

References

• Kurzweil, Ray (2012). How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed. New York: Viking Books. ISBN 978-0-670-02529-9.

External links

• Kurzweil's Official Site
• C-SPAN After Words with Ray Kurzweil (video)
• "Ray Kurzweil 'How to Create a Mind', Authors at Google" on YouTube