On TV, Ray Kurzweil Tells Me How to Build a Brain

Streams of Consciousness

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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.)

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.)