How to Make a Mind BY RAY KURZWEIL ANDREW OSTROVSKY / ISTOCKPHOTO Can nonbiological brains have he mammalian brain has a distinct aptitude not found in any other class of animal. We are capable of hierarchical thinking, of real minds of their own? In understanding a structure composed of diverse elements arranged this article, drawn from his in a pattern, representing that arrangement with a symbol, and then using that symbol as an element in a yet more elaborate latest book, futurist/inventor configuration. Ray Kurzweil describes the TThis capability takes place in a brain structure called the neocortex, which in humans has achieved a threshold of sophistication and capacity such that future of intelligence— we are able to call these patterns ideas. We are capable of building ideas that are ever more complex. We call this vast array of recursively linked ideas artificial and otherwise. knowledge. Only Homo sapiens have a knowledge base that itself evolves, grows exponentially, and is passed down from one generation to another. From How to Create a Mind by Ray Kurzweil. Copyright © 2012, Ray Kurzweil. Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 14 THE FUTURIST March-April 2013 • www.wfs.org © 2013 World Future Society • 7910 Woodmont Avenue, Suite 450, Bethesda, MD 20814, U.S.A. • All rights reserved. We are now in a position to speed own private stores of personal data driver of impending dangers is al- up the learning process by a factor of today. ready being installed in cars. One thousands or millions once again by Last but not least, we will be able such technology is based in part on migrating from biological to nonbio- to back up the digital portion of our the successful model of visual pro- logical intelligence. Once a digital intelligence. It is frightening to con- cessing in the brain created by MIT’s neocortex learns a skill, it can trans- template that none of the informa- Tomaso Poggio. Called MobilEye, it fer that know-how in minutes or tion contained in our neocortex is was developed by Amnon Shashua, even seconds. Ultimately we will backed up today. There is, of course, a former postdoctoral student of create an artificial neocortex that has one way in which we do back up Poggio’s. It is capable of alerting the the full range and flexibility of its some of the information in our driver to such dangers as an im- human counterpart. brains: by writing it down. The abil- pending collision or a child running Consider the benefits. Electronic ity to transfer at least some of our in front of the car and has recently circuits are millions of times faster thinking to a medium that can out- been installed in cars by such manu- than our biological circuits. At first last our biological bodies was a huge facturers as Volvo and BMW. we will have to devote all of this step forward, but a great deal of data I will focus now on language tech- speed increase to compensating for in our brains continues to remain nologies for several reasons: Not sur- the relative lack of parallelism in our vulnerable. prisingly, the hierarchical nature of computers. Parallelism is what gives language closely mirrors the hierar- our brains the ability to do so many The Next Chapter in chical nature of our thinking. Spoken different types of operations—walk- Artificial Intelligence language was our first technology, ing, talking, reasoning—all at once, with written language as the second. and perform these tasks so seam- Artificial intelligence is all around My own work in artificial intelli- lessly that we live our lives blissfully us. The simple act of connecting gence has been heavily focused on unaware that they are occurring at with someone via a text message, language. Finally, mastering lan- all. The digital neocortex will be e-mail, or cell-phone call uses intelli- guage is a powerfully leveraged ca- much faster than the biological vari- gent algorithms to route the infor- pability. Watson, the IBM computer ety and will only continue to in- mation. Almost every product we that beat two former Jeopardy! cham- crease in speed. touch is originally designed in a col- pions in 2011, has already read hun- When we augment our own neo- laboration between human and arti- dreds of millions of pages on the cortex with a synthetic version, we ficial intelligence and then built in Web and mastered the knowledge won’t have to worry about how automated factories. If all the AI sys- contained in these documents. Ulti- much additional neocortex can phys- tems decided to go on strike mately, machines will be able to ically fit into our bodies and brains, tomorrow, our civilization would be master all of the knowledge on the as most of it will be in the cloud, like crippled: We couldn’t get money Web—which is essentially all of the most of the computing we use today. from our bank, and indeed, our knowledge of our human–machine We have about 300 million pattern money would disappear; communi- civilization. recognizers in our biological neocor- cation, transportation, and manufac- One does not need to be an AI ex- tex. That’s as much as could be turing would all grind to a halt. For- pert to be moved by the performance squeezed into our skulls even with tunately, our intelligent machines are of Watson on Jeopardy! Although I the evolutionary innovation of a not yet intelligent enough to orga- have a reasonable understanding of large forehead and with the neocor- nize such a conspiracy. the methodology used in a number tex taking about 80% of the available What is new in AI today is the vis- of its key subsystems, that does not space. As soon as we start thinking cerally impressive nature of publicly diminish my emotional reaction to in the cloud, there will be no natural available examples. For example, watching it—him?—perform. Even a limits—we will be able to use bil- consider Google’s self-driving cars, perfect understanding of how all of lions or trillions of pattern recogniz- which as of this writing have gone its component systems work would ers, basically whatever we need, and over 200,000 miles in cities and not help you to predict how Watson whatever the law of accelerating re- towns. This technology will lead to would actually react to a given situa- turns can provide at each point in significantly fewer crashes and in- tion. It contains hundreds of inter- time. creased capacity of roads, alleviate acting subsystems, and each of these In order for a digital neocortex to the requirement of humans to per- is considering millions of competing learn a new skill, it will still require form the chore of driving, and bring hypotheses at the same time, so pre- many iterations of education, just as many other benefits. dicting the outcome is impossible. a biological neocortex does. Once a Driverless cars are actually already Doing a thorough analysis—after the single digital neocortex somewhere legal to operate on public roads in fact—of Watson’s deliberations for a and at some time learns something, Nevada with some restrictions, al- single three-second query would however, it can share that knowl- though widespread usage by the take a human centuries. edge with every other digital neocor- public throughout the world is not One limitation of the Jeopardy! tex without delay. We can each have expected until late in this decade. game is that the answers are gener- our own private neocortex extenders Technology that intelligently ally brief: It does not, for example, in the cloud, just as we have our watches the road and warns the pose questions of the sort that ask www.wfs.org • THE FUTURIST March-April 2013 15 contestants to name the five primary pha, along with continually updated themes of A Tale of Two Cities. To the data on topics ranging from econom- extent that it can find documents ics to physics. that do discuss the themes of this In a private conversation I had novel, a suitably modified version of with him, Wolfram estimated that Watson should be able to respond to self-organizing methods such as this. Coming up with such themes those used in Watson typically on its own from just reading the achieve about an 80% accuracy when book, and not essentially copying they are working well. Alpha, he the thoughts (even without the pointed out, is achieving about a words) of other thinkers, is another 90% accuracy. Of course, there is matter. Doing so would constitute a self-selection in both of these accu- higher-level task than Watson is ca- racy numbers, in that users (such as pable of today. myself) have learned what kinds of It is noteworthy that, although questions Alpha is good at, and a Watson’s language skills are actually “We could give our new similar factor applies to the self- somewhat below that of an educated organizing methods. Some 80% ap- human, it was able to defeat the best brain a more ambitious pears to be a reasonable estimate of two Jeopardy! players in the world. It goal, such as contributing how accurate Watson is on Jeopardy! could accomplish this because it is queries, but this was sufficient to de- able to combine its language ability to a better world. A goal feat the best humans. and knowledge understanding with along these lines, of It is my view that self-organizing the perfect recall and highly accurate methods such as I articulate as the memories that machines possess.