Ray Kurzweil. Courtesy of Humanity+ via Flickr.
I recently interviewed author and inventor
Ray Kurzweil about his new book, “How to Create A Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed.” The
58-minute segment aired on December 1, 2 and 3 on the C-SPAN2 program
“After Words.”
The book’s thesis is that it is essentially possible to
reverse-engineer the human brain to create a computer mind that works
like yours and mine. The advantages of such a creation, Kurzweil told
me, are three-fold. First, we can gain an improved understanding of the
brain so that we are better able to fix problems with it—for example,
developing new treatments for psychiatric and neurological disorders.
Second, biologically inspired, more intelligent machines can help us
solve numerous practical problems. Third, such a brain-replica may help
us understand ourselves, and ultimately to help us become more
intelligent. “We are a human machine civilization and we create these
tools to make ourselves smarter,” he says. (Hear this response at about
13 minutes.)
Courtesy of Image Editor via Flickr.
These intelligent machines will take various forms, he suggests,
evolving from the cell phones virtually all of us carry. If you ask a
phone to do something for you, in most cases, it doesn’t do what you ask
on its own. The action, he says, takes place in the cloud. Future
devices, he predicts, will also be gateways to the cloud. These gadgets
will evolve in stages. They soon will be small enough to put in the
display in your glasses as in
Google Glass,
which is a computer embedded in the frame of your glasses. Your screen,
which displays all of visual reality, could be augmented to provide
information so that when you look at someone, information about that
person pops up. Just knowing a person’s name will be “a killer app,” he
quips. These systems will become intelligent, he predicts. Search
engines won’t wait to be asked for information; they will know you are
struggling with something beforehand.
How will they know? “They will be listening in on everything you are
doing, everything you write, everything you read, everything you say,
everything you hear—if you let it,” he says. The system, he says,
“should be listening in like a friend and realize: she needs this
particular piece of information.” Of course, no friend of mine can tap
into my brain. And I have some serious reservations about uploading my
thoughts to the cloud. But Kurzweil is optimistic about this future
state of affairs. (Check out the dialogue starting at 17 minutes.)
Kurzweil predicts this technology will be blood cell-sized by the
2030s and 2040s, and will eventually live inside us. Tiny computers in
our bloodstream will keep us healthy by augmenting our immune system.
They will also enter our brains, enabling our neurons to act as gateways
to the cloud and thereby expanding our mental capacities. (Listen to
the chat at about 22 minutes.)
Schools for Computers
IBM's Watson computer beat human champions at Jeopardy! Courtesy of Clockready via Wikimedia Commons.
To create this future, Kurzweil says, you not only have to simulate the mammalian
neocortex
(the brain’s outermost layer), you have to educate it. If you don’t,
Kurzweil says, the resulting electronic brain won’t do much. It might be
cute, he suggests, but it will behave like a newborn. There are several
approaches to educating these machines. For a detailed brain simulation
such as the one being developed under the auspices of
The Human Brain Project,
you could use an electronic model as a teacher. That is, one computer
could instruct another. When Kurzweil pioneered speech and character
recognition systems in the 1970s and 1980s, he taught them by exposing
the software to examples of real world speech.
Watson, a computer system
designed by IBM that beat two human champions at Jeopardy! in 2011, was
educated over the course of weeks using Wikipedia and other
encyclopedias. (Hear Kurzweil’s explanation at about 31 minutes.)
What about the body? Many researchers believe that our intellect is
strongly influenced by interactions between our physical selves and the
environment. I asked Kurzweil how we incorporate this concept, called
embodied cognition, into our artificial brains if they lack eyes, limbs
and the rest. Kurzweil acknowledges this limitation, but believes we
have developed the capacity to conceive of abstract concepts in a way
that is removed from the body. In addition, he suggests that there is a
conceptual, or limited body for these artificial minds. Watson has the
ability to speak, for example, to display text and to hear. In addition,
the body can be a liability at times: We don’t have to worry about the
system having aggression or feeling jealousy, he points out. (This
discussion starts at about 35 minutes.)
Humans have other deficiencies, too. Our memories are biased and
distorted, for example, our decision-making suboptimal and our behavior
often irrational. So I wondered whether our brain-based computers were
really going to mimic such imperfections, or instead, perhaps improve
upon us? Of course, he reminds me, we created computers in the first
place to compensate for limitations of the human brain. A computer can
remember literally, something we can’t do. Critical thinking is another
one of our weaknesses. Inconsistent notions often coexist in our minds.
If you can identify and reconcile the inconsistencies, you can come out
with some higher truth. Critical thinking is something we try to teach
students—and can similarly teach artificial brains, Kurzweil says. He
proposes that our artificial minds include a critical thinking module
that continually looks for, and tries to resolve, contradictions. (Tune
into the conversation at 39 minutes.)
The human brain excels at recognizing patterns. Courtesy of Light Play via Flickr.
Kurzweil’s ideas about the human brain and artificial intelligence
can be traced back to age five, when he first decided to become an
inventor. As a young boy, Kurzweil had an inventory of parts from
various construction toys he’d been given and old electronic gadgets
he’d collected from neighbors. “I had this idea that if I could figure
out how to put these parts together in the right way, I could solve any
problem,” he recalls. At 12, he discovered the computer. Although most
kids now “discover” the computer long before then, Kurzweil turned 12 in
1960, when, he estimated, only a dozen computers existed in all of New
York City. He began programming, and wrote some statistical programs for
the predecessor of Head Start. When Kurzweil was 14, he penned a paper
about thinking. The paper proposed that the human brain was essentially a
pattern recognizer, that it recognizes patterns really well,
foreshadowing the ideas in his latest book. He then created a computer
program that could find patterns in music and write original music using
those patterns. The program won the Westinghouse Science Talent Search,
among other contests. (Tune in at 52 minutes for this story.)
“I’ve been thinking about thinking for 50 years,” Kurzweil says at
the close of our conversation. “Now, we have enough information to
articulate a really clear theory of what I call the pattern recognition
theory of mind and then use that biologically inspired paradigm to
create even better AI.”
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