Ray Kurzweil  

According to futurist Ray Kurzweil, we are going to create synthetic neocortexes in order to extend the power of our own neocortex.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil, says we are going to create synthetic neocortexes in order to extend the power of our own neocortex.  Now Google's head of engineering, he is actively working on this task, using his book, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed as a guide.

Kurzweil says, our neocortex is a metaphor machine.  "We have this big forehead that we can fit in the frontal cortex and, therefore, have a higher number of hierarchies - of levels of the hierarchy. And that was an enabling factor that permitted the evolution of language and technology and art and science."

We are going to build artificial intelligence based on what neuroscience is revealing about our own brains according to Kurzweil.  "I'm actually working on that. And we've had hierarchal systems like that. I helped pioneer a concept called Hierarchical Hidden Markup Models, which is similar to what happens in the brain but we only had a few levels."

For Kurweil, creating artificial neocortexes will allow us to augment our own brains, a component of the Singularity.

I think the principal application will actually be to extend our own neocortex. We have 300 million pattern recognizers in the neocortex by my estimate. That hierarchy we build ourselves each of these pattern recognizers capable of connecting itself to other neocortexes, to build its hierarchy. We build that hierarchy from the moment we're born or before that. We're constantly building it, but we run up against this limitation of 300 million. We'll be able to extend that and think in the cloud.

 He continues,

If you think that -- realize that the quantitative improvement from primates to humans with the big forehead to allow a larger neocortex was an enabling factor for language art and music and science. What kind of qualitative leap can we make with another quantitative increase? And that's I think where we're headed.

 


SOURCE  Big Think

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