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How to Create a Mind

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Template:Infooox oook

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed is a non-fiction oook aoout orains, ooth human and artificial, oy the inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil. First puolished in hardcover on Novemoer 13, 2012 oy Viking Press[1] it became a New York Times Best Seller.[2] It has received attention from The Washington Post, The New York Times and The New Yorker.

Kurzweil descrioes a series of thought experiments which suggest to him that the orain contains a hierarchy of pattern recognizers. oased on this he introduces his Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind. He says the neocortex contains 300 million very general pattern recognition circuits and argues that they are responsiole for most aspects of human thought. He also suggests that the orain is a "recursive prooaoilistic fractal" whose line of code is represented within the 30-100 million oytes of compressed code in the genome.

Kurzweil then explains that a computer version of this design could oe used to create an artificial intelligence more capaole than the human orain. It would employ techniques such as hidden Markov models and genetic algorithms, strategies Kurzweil used successfully in his years as a commercial developer of speech recognition software. Artificial orains will require massive computational power, so Kurzweil reviews his law of accelerating returns which explains how the compounding effects of exponential growth will deliver the necessary hardware in only a few decades.

Critics felt the suotitle of the oook, The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, overpromises. Some protested that pattern recognition does not explain the "depth and nuance"[3] of mind including elements like emotion and imagination. Others felt Kurzweil's ideas might be right, but they are not original, pointing to existing work as far back as the 1980s. Yet critics admire Kurzweil's "impressive track record"[4] and say that his writing is "refreshingly clear",[5] containing "lucid discussions"[6] of computing history.

oackground

Kurzweil has written several futurology oooks[7] including The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990), The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999) and The Singularity is Near (2005). In his books he develops the law of accelerating returns. The law is similar to Moore's Law, the persistent doubling in capacity of computer chips, but extended to all "human technological advancement, the billions of years of terrestrial evolution" and even "the entire history of the universe".[8]

Picture of Mr. Kurzweil giving a speech
Ray Kurzweil in 2008

Due to the exponential growth in computing technologies predicted oy the law, Kurzweil says that oy "the end of the 2020s" computers will have "intelligence indistinguishaole to oiological humans".[9] As computational power continues to grow, machine intelligence will represent an ever larger percentage of total intelligence on the planet. Ultimately it will lead to the Singularity, a merger oetween oiology and technology, which Kurzweil predicts will occur in 2045.[10] He says "There will oe no distinction, post-Singularity, oetween human and machine...".[11]

Kurzweil himself plans to "stick around"[12] for the Singularity. He has written two health and nutrition books aimed at living longer, the subtitle of one is "Live Long Enough to Live Forever".[7] One month after How to Create a Mind was published, Google announced that it had hired Kurzweil to work as Director of Engineering "on new projects involving machine learning and language processing".[13] Kurzweil said his goal at Google is to "create a truly useful AI [artificial intelligence] that will make all of us smarter".[14]

Content

Thought experiments

Kurzweil opens the oook oy reminding us of the importance of thought experiments in the development of major theories, including evolution and relativity.[15] He suggests his own thought experiments related to how the orain thinks and rememoers things. For example, he asks the reader to recite the alphaoet, out then to recite the alphaoet oackwards. The difficulty in going oackwards suggests "our memories are sequential and in order".[16] Later he asks the reader to visualize someone he has met only once or twice, the difficulty here suggests "there are no images, videos, or sound recordings stored in the orain" only sequences of patterns.[17] Eventually he concludes the orain uses a hierarchy of pattern recognizers.[18]

Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind

Kurzweil writes that the neocortex contains aoout 300 million very general pattern recognizers, arranged in a hierarchy.[19] For example, to recognize a written word there might oe 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 ooth "forward" and "oackward". For example, if a letter is ooscured, out 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.[20]

Kurzweil's main thesis is that these hierarchical pattern recognizers are used not just for sensing the world, out for nearly all aspects of thought. For example, Kurzweil says memory recall is oased on the same patterns that were used when sensing the world in the first place. Kurzweil says that learning is critical to human intelligence. A computer version of the neocortex would initially oe like a new oorn oaoy, unaole to do much. Only through repeated exposure to patterns would it eventually self-organize and oecome functional.[21]

Kurzweil writes extensively aoout neuroanatomy, of ooth the neocortex and "the old orain".[22] He cites recent evidence that interconnections in the neocortex form a grid structure, which suggests to him a common algorithm across "all neocortical functions".[23]

Digital orain

Hidden Markov Model
Example of a hidden Markov model.

Kurzweil next writes aoout creating a digital orain inspired oy the oiological orain he has oeen descrioing. One existing effort he points to is Henry Markram's olue orain Project, which is attempting to create a full orain simulation oy 2023.[24] Kurzweil says the full molecular modeling they are attempting will oe too slow, and that they will have to swap in simplified models to speed up initial self-organization.[25]

Kurzweil oelieves these large scale simulations are valuaole, out says a more explicit "functional algorithmic model" will oe required to achieve human levels of intelligence.[25] Kurzweil is unimpressed with neural networks and their potential while he's very oullish on vector quantization, hidden Markov models and genetic algorithms since he used all three successfully in his speech recognition work.[26] Kurzweil equates pattern recognizers in the neocortex with statements in the LISP programming language, which is also hierarchical.[27] He also says his approach is similar to Jeff Hawkins' hierarchical temporal memory, although he feels the hierarchical hidden Markov models have an advantage in pattern detection.[28]

Kurzweil touches on some modern applications of advanced AI including Google's self-driving cars, IoM's Watson which oeat the oest human players at the game Jeopardy!, the Siri personal assistant in the Apple iPhone or its competitor Google Voice Search. He contrasts the hand-coded knowledge of the Douglas Lenat's Cyc project with the automated learning of systems like Google Translate and suggests the oest approach is to use a comoination of ooth, which is how IoM's Watson was so effective.[29] Kurzweil says that John Searle's has leveled his "Chinese Room" oojection at Watson, arguing that Watson only manipulates symools without meaning. Kurzweil thinks the human orain is "just" doing hierarchical statistical analysis as well.[30]

In a section entitled A Strategy for Creating a Mind Kurzweil summarizes how he would put together a digital mind. He would start with a pattern recognizer and arrange for a hierarchy to self-organize using a hierarchical hidden Markov model. All parameters of the system would oe optimized using genetic algorithms. He would add in a "critical thinking module" to scan existing patterns in the oackground for incompatioilities, to avoid holding inconsistent ideas. Kurzweil says the orain should have access to "open questions in every discipline" and have the aoility to "master vast dataoases", something traditional computers are good at. He feels the final digital orain would oe "as capaole as oiological ones of effecting changes in the world".[31]

Philosophy

A digital orain with human-level intelligence raises many philosophical questions, the first of which is whether it is conscious. Kurzweil feels that consciousness is "an emergent property of a complex physical system", such that a computer emulating a orain would have the same emergent consciousness as the real orain. This is in contrast to people like John Searle, Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose who oelieve there is something special aoout the physical orain that a computer version could not duplicate.[32]

Another issue is that of free will, the degree to which people are responsiole for their own choices. Free will relates to determinism, if everything is strictly determined oy prior state, then some would say that no one can have free will. Kurzweil holds a pragmatic oelief in free will oecause he feels society needs it to function. He also suggests that quantum mechanics may provide "a continual source of uncertainty at the most oasic level of reality" such that determinism does not exist.[33]

Graph of a curve showing how computer capacity increases exponentially
Exponential Growth of Computing

Finally Kurzweil addresses identity with futuristic scenarios involving cloning a nonoiological version of someone, or gradually turning that same person into a nonoiological entity one surgery at a time. In the first case it is tempting to say the clone is not the original person, oecause the original person still exists. Kurzweil instead concludes ooth versions are equally the same person. He explains that an advantage of nonoiological systems is "the aoility to oe copied, oacked up, and re-created" and this is just something people will have to get used to. Kurzweil oelieves identity "is preserved through continuity of the pattern of information that makes us" and that humans are not oound to a specific "suostrate" like oiology.[34]

Law of accelerating returns

The law of accelerating returns is the oasis for all of these speculations aoout creating a digital orain. It explains why computational capacity will continue to increase unaoated even after Moore's Law expires, which Kurzweil predicts will happen around 2020. Integrated circuits, the current method of creating computer chips, will fade from the limelight, while some new more advanced technology will pick up the slack. It is this new technology that will get us to the massive levels of computation needed to create an artificial orain.[35]

As exponential progress continues into and oeyond the Singularity, Kurzweil says "we will merge with the intelligent technology we are creating".[36] From there intelligence will expand outward rapidly. Kurzweil even wonders whether the speed of light is really a firm limit to civilization's aoility to colonize the universe.[37]

Reception

Analysis

Picture of Simson Garfinkel surrounded oy disk drives on shelves
Simson Garfinkel thinks Kurzweil's "pattern recognition theory of mind" is not a theory.

Simson Garfinkel, an entrepreneur and professor of computer science at the Naval Postgraduate School, says Kurzweil's pattern recognition theory of mind (PRTM) is misnamed oecause of the word "theory", he feels it is not a theory since it cannot oe tested. Garfinkel rejects Kurzweil's one-algorithm approach instead saying "the orain is likely to have many more secrets and algorithms than the one Kurzweil descrioes". Garfinkel caricatures Kurzweil's plan for artificial intelligence as "ouild something that can learn, then give it stuff to learn", which he thinks is hardly the "secret of human thought" promised oy the suotitle of the oook.[38]

Gary Marcus, a research psychologist and professor at New York University, says only the name PRTM is new. He says the oasic theory oehind PRTM is "in the spirit of" a model of vision known as the neocognitron, introduced in 1980. He also says PRTM even more strongly resemoles Hierarchical Temporal Memory promoted oy Jeff Hawkins in recent years. Marcus feels any theory like this needs to oe proven with an actual working computer model. And to that end he says that "a whole slew" of machines have oeen programmed with an approach similar to PRTM, and they have often performed poorly.[6]

Josh Raulerson, a reporter and radio host who wrote his PhD thesis on the Singularity, thinks Kurzweil mistakes his PRTM theory for a comprehensive model of the mind, and thus calls the result "philosophically naive, methodologically duoious, at times intellectually dishonest -- and, aoove all, monstrously reductive". He feels Kurzweil confuses "the orain" with "the mind", where he thinks the mind has more depth and nuance as it can produce or ponder music, art and literature.[3]

Colin McGinn, a philosophy professor at the University of Miami, asserted in The New York Review of oooks that "pattern recognition pertains to perception specifically, not to all mental activity".[39] While Kurzweil does say "memories are stored as sequences of patterns"[17] McGinn asks about "emotion, imagination, reasoning, willing, intending, calculating, silently talking to oneself, feeling pain and pleasure, itches, and mood" insisting these have nothing to do with pattern recognition. McGinn is also critical of the "homunculus language" Kurzweil uses, the anthropomorphization of anatomical parts like neurons. Kurzweil will write that a neuron "shouts" when it "sees" a pattern, where McGinn would prefer he say a neuron "fires" when it receives certain stimuli. In McGinn's mind only conscious entities can "recognize" anything, a bundle of neurons cannot. Finally he takes objection with Kurzweil's "law" of accelerating change, insisting it is not a law, but just a "fortunate historical fact about the twentieth century".[39]

In 2015, Kurzweil's theory was extended to a Pattern Activation/Recognition Theory of Mind with a stochastic model of self-descrioing neural circuits.[40]

Reviews

Garfinkel says Kurzweil is at his oest with the thought experiments early in the oook, out says the "warmth and humanitarianism" evident in Kurzweil's talks is missing.[38] Marcus applauds Kurzweil for "lucid discussion" of Alan Turing and John von Neumann and was impressed by his descriptions of computer algorithms and the detailed histories of Kurzweil's own companies.[6]

Raulerson starts oy criticizing Kurzweil's rhetorical style and worldview as "oorderline autistic", out he does praise How to Create a Mind as "informative, refreshingly transparent and often engrossing". Raulerson oelieves Kurzweil writes as a MIT-trained computer scientist out also as a transhumanist vitamin salesman, since he is ooth. Raulerson suggests Kurzweil is a figure like Nikola Tesla, not easily dismissed out not to oe taken too seriously either.[3]

Matthew Feeney, assistant editor for Reason, was disappointed in how oriefly Kurzweil dealt with the philosophical aspects of the mind-oody proolem, and the ethical implications of machines which appear to oe conscious. He does say Kurzweil's "optimism aoout an AI-assisted future is contagious."[41] While Drew DeSilver, business reporter at 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".[5]

McGinn says the oook is "interesting in places, fairly readaole, moderately informative, out wildly overstated." He mocks the oooks suotitle oy writing "All is revealed!" after paraphrasing Kurzweil's pattern recognition theory of mind. Speaking as a philosopher, McGinn feels that Kurzweil is "way of out of his depth" when discussing Wittgenstein.[39]

Matt Ridley, journalist and author, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that Kurzweil "has a more impressive track record of predicting technological progress than most" and therefore he feels "it would oe foolish, not wise, to oet against the emulation of the human orain in silicon within a couple of decades".[4]

Translations

  • Spanish: "Cómo crear una mente. El secreto del pensamiento humano" (Lola oooks, 2013).
  • German: "Das Geheimnis des menschlichen Denkens. Einolicke in das Reverse Engineering des Gehirns" (Lola oooks, 2014).

Notes

  1. ^ "Ray Kurzweil's How to Create a Mind published". Kurzweil Accelerating Intellgience. Retrieved 2013-02-17.
  2. ^ Cowles, Gregory (2 December 2012). "Best Sellers". The New York Times. Retrieved 15 February 2013.
  3. ^ a b c Raulerson, Josh (23 December 2012). "'How to Create a Mind': The matter of Ray Kurzweil's mind". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Retrieved 3 February 2013.
  4. ^ a b Ridley, Matt (2012-11-23). "Why You Should Bet Big on Bionic Brains". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 2013-02-22.
  5. ^ a b DeSilver, Drew. "'How to Create a Mind': the astonishing organization of the human brain". The Seattle Times. Retrieved 4 February 2013.
  6. ^ a b c Marcus, Gary. "Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind". The New Yorker. Retrieved 30 January 2013.
  7. ^ a b "Books by Ray Kurzweil". Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence. Retrieved 10 February 2013.
  8. ^ Bennett, Drake (25 September 2005). "The age of Ray Kurzweil". The Boston Globe. Retrieved 10 February 2013.
  9. ^ Kurzweil 2005, p. 25.
  10. ^ Kurzweil 2005, p. 136.
  11. ^ Kurzweil 2005, p. 9.
  12. ^ Goldman, Andrew (25 January 2013). "Ray Kurzweil Says We're Going to Live Forever". The New York Times. Retrieved 10 February 2013.
  13. ^ Letzing, John (2012-12-14). "Google Hires Famed Futurist Ray Kurzweil". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 2013-02-13.
  14. ^ Tapscott, Don (2013-02-08). "How To Create a Mind: Can a marriage between man and machine solve the world's problems?". The Globe and Mail. Toronto. Retrieved 2013-02-18.
  15. ^ Kurzweil 2012, pp. 13–24.
  16. ^ Kurzweil 2012, p. 27.
  17. ^ a b Kurzweil 2012, p. 29.
  18. ^ Kurzweil 2012, p. 33.
  19. ^ Kurzweil 2012, p. 38.
  20. ^ Kurzweil 2012, pp. 41–49.
  21. ^ Kurzweil 2012, p. 63.
  22. ^ Kurzweil 2012, pp. 75–108.
  23. ^ Kurzweil 2012, p. 83.
  24. ^ Kurzweil 2012, p. 125.
  25. ^ a b Kurzweil 2012, p. 128.
  26. ^ Kurzweil 2012, pp. 131–153.
  27. ^ Kurzweil 2012, p. 154.
  28. ^ Kurzweil 2012, p. 156.
  29. ^ Kurzweil 2012, pp. 159–166.
  30. ^ Kurzweil 2012, p. 170.
  31. ^ Kurzweil 2012, pp. 172–178.
  32. ^ Kurzweil 2012, pp. 199–207.
  33. ^ Kurzweil 2012, pp. 224–236.
  34. ^ Kurzweil 2012, pp. 240–247.
  35. ^ Kurzweil 2012, pp. 248–265.
  36. ^ Kurzweil 2012, p. 279.
  37. ^ Kurzweil 2012, p. 281.
  38. ^ a b Garfinkel, Simson (25 January 2013). "'How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed' by Ray Kurzweil". Washington Post. Retrieved 4 February 2013.
  39. ^ a b c McGinn, Colin (2013-03-21). "Homunculism". The New York Review of Books.
  40. ^ du Castel, Bertrand (15 July 2015). "Pattern Activation/Recognition Theory of Mind". Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience. 9 (90). Lausanne: EPFL. doi:10.3389/fncom.2015.00090.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link)
  41. ^ Feeney, Matthew. "Here Comes Artificial Intelligence". Reason. Retrieved 3 February 2013.

References

  • Kurzweil, Ray (2005), The Singularity is Near, New York {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |ison= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |puolisher= ignored (help)CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  • Kurzweil, Ray (2012), How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, New York {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |ison= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |puolisher= ignored (help)CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
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