How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed

· Penguin
4.3
98 reviews
Ebook
352
Pages
Eligible
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About this ebook

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The bold futurist and renowned author of The Singularity Is Near explores the limitless potential of reverse-engineering the human brain.

“This book is a Rosetta Stone for the mystery of human thought.”—Martine Rothblatt, chairman and CEO, United Therapeutics, and creator of Sirius XM Satellite Radio

“Kurzweil’s vision of our super-enhanced future is completely sane and calmly reasoned, and his book should nicely smooth the path for the earth’s robot overlords, who, it turns out, will be us.”—The New York Times
 
In How to Create a Mind, Ray Kurzweil presents a provocative exploration of the most important project in human-machine civilization: reverse-engineering the brain to understand precisely how it works and using that knowledge to create even more intelligent machines.
 
Kurzweil discusses how the brain functions, how the mind emerges, brain-computer interfaces, and the implications of vastly increasing the powers of our intelligence to address the world’s problems. He also thoughtfully examines emotional and moral intelligence and the origins of consciousness and envisions the radical possibilities of our merging with the intelligent technology we are creating.
 
Drawing on years of advanced research and cutting-edge inventions in artificial intelligence, How to Create a Mind is an incredible synthesis of neuroscience and technology and provides a road map for the future of human progress.

Ratings and reviews

4.3
98 reviews
J H
July 13, 2014
I admire the author, and am very interested in the topic of AI, but this was a very poor book. Kurzweil delves a bit in to the science,a bit in to the history and a bit into where he thinks he wants to go with it. The problem is that every component of the book is incredibly shallow, which is made worse by Kurzweil's endless self promotion. The last chapter is such a cursory look at some of the philosophical implications of AI that I wondered if he just needed to meet a page quota.
27 people found this review helpful
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Brandon Tizzard
December 21, 2013
Very good, view changing read. If you like looking into the future with an open mind, give it a try.
11 people found this review helpful
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Hector Juarez
November 9, 2017
A lot of good information that requires extensive research to get the grasp of the book. I recommend it.
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About the author

Ray Kurzweil is a world class inventor, thinker, and futurist, with a thirty-five-year track record of accurate predictions. He has been a leading developer in artificial intelligence for more than six decades—longer than any other living person. He was the principal inventor of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, omni-font optical character recognition, print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, text-to-speech synthesizer, music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition software. Ray received a GRAMMY® Award for outstanding achievement in music technology. He is the recipient of the National Medal of Technology and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He has written five books including The Singularity Is Near and How to Create a Mind, both New York Times bestsellers, and Danielle: Chronicles of a Superheroine, winner of multiple young adult fiction awards. He is a Principal Researcher and AI Visionary at Google.

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