Greg Laden's Blog — November 20, 2012 | Greg Laden

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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed is Ray Kurzweil’s latest book. You may know of him as the author of The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.

Kurzweil is a “futurist” and has a reputation as being one of the greatest thinkers of our age, as well as being one of the greatest hucksters of the age, depending on whom you ask.

I think there are three key ideas in this book about which I have varying opinions. First, he presents a model of how the brain works. Second, he suggests that we can, in essence, reverse engineer the brain using computing technology. Third, he discusses the rate at which computing technology becomes more capable of doing such a thing, both qualitatively and quantitatively. He ties these idea together with reference to artificial intelligence theory. […]