I have mentioned his name in my list of leading thinkers of the technology. He is one of the few scientists you can indisputably call them a futurist.

The Author of the book Singularity is near, after discussing so many different technological trends in his previous book, here is going to show the roadmap of creating something superior to the human mind.

The most significant challenge Ray Kurzweil faces is trying to reverse engineer the mind.

In the last centuries, philosophers and metaphysic-believers have lost the brain ground in the battle with scientists and have accepted that the brain is part of the biologist’s territory. However, the mind is still considered by them and many other people with biased-scientists as something beyond an embodied cognition.

There are still many people who are not able (or willing) to accept consciousness as an emerging property of a complex system and prefer to consider it as a separate entity infused in the body of the living entities.

Therefore, you may see many objections to the book that are trying to protect their comfort zone even under the scientific cloak.

Here is the table of contents of How to create a mind:

Kurzweil states in the preface of the book that reverse engineering of the mind is the most important project in the universe.

In his book, he tries to apply pattern recognition knowledge to analyzing the brain function. He calls this process as Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind (PRTM).

Here’s the focal point of the criticisms of his book: Whether it’s the most appropriate approach to reverse engineering the mind or Kurzweil tries to see the brain as a nail just because The hammer is the only tool he has in hand?

In my opinion, the book is insightful enough to dismiss these criticisms and justify reading it and thinking about it.  Considering the fact that if we expect that every scientist approaches the problems with the tools he is not equipped with (!), then we are entering the territory of philosophy and metaphysics and all the superstitions which have been around for centuries. 

From Kurzweil’s point of view in How to create a mind, the latest evolved part of the brain (Neocortex) is functioning like a hierarchical pattern recognition system, and this is what distinguishes it from the old reptilian brain.

Here we can have the new definitions of the existing mind-related terms:

• Neocortex: a multilayer perceptron (with multiple layers of neurons) receiving sensory inputs and each layer combines the signals and passes them to the next layer (Part of them which are greater than some threshold value). Assumption: next layers can send back signals and adjust triggering threshold of the previous layers.
• Memory: a list of patterns that can be recalled with specific triggers. This lists of patterns are somehow interpolation of the past and a tool for extrapolating the future.
• Learning: Pattern recognition in different levels of the hierarchy. This model can justify why we are not able to deeply understand multi-layer concept simultaneously.
• Misunderstanding: Trying to transfer patterns stored in my mind to yours or using my pattern classification system to understand your sensory data of stored information.
• Directed Thinking: Aligning the whole pattern recognition system with the current problem on the table.
• Undirected Thinking: Leaving the patterns to interact with each other and probably re-classified to reach to a new pattern. Undirected thinking has a major contribution to the evolution of the mind.

Besides all appraisals and criticisms, how to create a mind is worth reading and thinking. It’s one of the greatest manifests of the transhumanism trying to go further than appealing inflated slogans.

Quotations from introduction of the book – How to create a mind

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After industrial revolution, technologists moved to the factories. Then, the future of technology found a new meaning: Thinking about future factories and fully-automated production lines operated by mechanical robots.

After development of the electronic technology and invention of semiconductors, discussions about the future of technology inclined toward smaller and smarter gadgets (e.g. computers, mobile devices, watches, home control systems). This approach is still the dominant trend in predicting the future of the technology.

But something missed in the middle of these amazing imaginative discussions about future. We are reaching the singularity as it is neatly described by Ray Kurzweil in his book titled the singularity is near. Future is not the fast-paced-past. It’s the time to expect radical changes. Not only in the devices we use but also in ourselves as one of the most powerful species ever emerged on the planet.

Many people may think it’s nonsense to think about the future in this sense. But there’s one thing for sure. If we want to have some contribution in building the future, we need to think about this singularity and its consequences.

The best point to start is following the people who are already on the edge. The ones who’ve helped us to reach here and the ones who are not content with the current stage of the human development.

Here’s a short list of the people I believe they belong to the future. Their concerns are not limited to the near future: the next year or the next decade. They think about and talk about the future of humanity and transhumanism.

This list is still under development and I will add more names to it:

Eric Schmidt

He has always been in my people-of-future list. Not as executive chairman of google, but as someone who is interested in future of humanity and the developing path of the digital age.

His book about the new digital age is one of the most popular books about this topic enriched with many contemporary practical and political examples (Here‘s my review of the book).

He also has an active twitter account.

Raymond Kurzweil

He works as director of engineering at google and has been involved in the development of some of the influential technologies we know today (e.g. optical character recognition, speech recognition, text to speech synthesis).

He has a very active and up-to-date website reporting or republishing his articles in other media. Also don’t miss his book titled Singularity is near on the subject of singularity.

Marvin Minsky

As co-founder of MIT’s AI laboratory, he has been engaged with the concept of intelligence for decades. He doesn’t have a very active presence in the online world and is not so interested in social networks or blogging (Marvin Minsky is his official MIT page). But would be nice if you could view his TED talk on health and the human mind.

He has some influential books and articles about future of the technology which I think The Emotion Machine would be a good starting point.

Jeff Hawkins

The gadget world knows him as inventor of the Palm Pilot. But he has many other things to tell us about ourselves. Jeff has dedicated his time on research about neuroscience and developing a general theory about the function of the brain.

He has a very simple yet deep book on intelligence and an amazing TED talk about the way brain science will change computing.

Peter Thiel

You will understate him if call him as co-founder of paypal or first outside-investor of facebook. He is a modern business philosopher with some hands on rich and famous technology-based businesses. His book titled Zero to One is a good starting point to know him more.

Nick Bostrom

Nick Bostrom envisioned a future enriched with machine intelligence long before it became the dominant point of view. His website is a good place to start if you want to know him and his book titled superintelligence is an effective tool if you want to understand him!

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