The Mind and How To Build One | KurzweilAI

The Mind and How To Build One | KurzweilAI: "At the Singularity Summit in San Francisco at 11 AM on Saturday August 14, Ray Kurzweil will present an overview of “arguably the most important project in the history of the human-machine civilization”:to model and reverse-engineer the brain, with the goal of creating intelligent machines to address the grand challenges of humanity. He prepared the following statement on his talk at the conference.

What does it mean to understand the brain? Where are we on the roadmap to this goal? What are the effective routes to progress – detailed modeling, theoretical effort, improvement of imaging and computational technologies? What predictions can we make? What are the consequences of materialization of such predictions – social, ethical? I will address these questions and examine some of the most common criticisms of the exponential growth of information technology including criticisms from hardware (“Moore’s Law will not go on forever”), software (“software is stuck in the mud”), the brain (“the brain is too complicated to understand or replicate”), ontology (“software is not capable of thinking or of consciousness”), and promise versus peril (“biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence are too dangerous”)."