Ray Kurzweil on Biologically Inspired Models of Intelligence

 Ray Kurzweil  

Recently at the Google I/O Conference, the company's Director of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil spoke and was interviewed.  He discussed some of his familiar concepts and then talked a bit more about his artificial intelligence work at Google.

For decades Ray Kurzweil has explored how artificial intelligence can enrich and expand human capabilities. In his latest book, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, he takes this exploration to the next step: reverse-engineering the brain to understand precisely how it works, then applying that knowledge to create intelligent machines.

In this talk, recorded recently at the Google I/O Conference, Kurweil reviews some of his familiar concepts on the Singularity, including the Law of Accelerating Returns.  In the interview following the speech, with Google engineer, Robert J. "RJ" Mical, he goes into more detail about his work in artificial intelligence at Google.

In the near term, Kurzweil's project at the company is developing artificial intelligence based on biologically inspired models of the neocortex to enhance functions such as search, answering questions, interacting with the user, and language translation.

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Kurzweil described how the brain is made up of a series of increasingly more abstract parts. The most abstract — which allows us to judge if something is good or bad, intelligent or unintelligent — is an area that has been difficult to replicate with a computer.

"My leap of faith is that an entity seems conscious, and seems to be having the subjective experiences it claims to be having, I'll believe its conscious."

According to Kurzweil, humans will need to build computers that can build abstract consciousness from a more concrete level. Humans will program them to recognize patterns, and then from those patterns they will need to be smart enough to learn to understand more.

People have a tendency to dismiss using artificial intelligence for specific applications like speech recognition, Kurzweil said, but he believes each new application is a part of the greater effort to develop AI.

“I like the idea of crossing the river one stone to the next,” Kurzweil said. “We do get from here to there one step at a time.”

The goal is to understand natural language to communicate with the user as well as to understand the meaning of web documents and books. In the long term, Kurzweil believes it is only by extending our minds with our intelligent technology that we can overcome humanity's grand challenges.

Comically at the end of the interview, with less than two minutes remaining, Mical asks the question, "What is consciousness? What is free will? What is soul?" To which Kurzweil responds, "I always thought you had a sense of humor. One minute should be plenty for that."

Kurzweil did make an attempt at the question however:

Whether or not an entity has consciousness is not a scientific question because there is no falsifiable experiment that could be run to test if an entity is conscious.  We assume that each other is conscious in the human experience...an AI could claim it is conscious, Eugene Goostman claimed he was conscious, but it wasn't very convincing...our whole moral system is based on consciousness, so you need a leap of faith.  My leap of faith is that an entity seems conscious, and seems to be having the subjective experiences it claims to be having, I'll believe its conscious.   I'll also make an objective prediction that most people will accept the consciousness of these entities.  

SOURCE  Google Developers

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