Kurzweil explores the mind and humanity's journey to recreate it in his presentation from Singularity Summit 2010.

Humanity has questions about the development of AI, and for decades Ray Kurzweil has been trying to find the answers. Those who know the author, futurist, and inventor’s work will be familiar with his beliefs in the exponential growth of information technology, and the inclusion of more technologies into the IT label. Lately, Kurzweil has become increasingly interested in the human mind, how we may be able to understand it, and eventually how we could recreate it. He’s working on his seventh book, How the Mind Works and How to Build One, which will explore those concepts. This past August, at the annual Singularity Summit, Kurzweil gave attendees a sneak peak into his upcoming book via an hour long presentation with almost the the same name: “The Mind and How to Build One”. Thanks to the Summit organizers, The Singularity Institute, Kurzweil’s talk is now available to watch online; check it out in the video below. From his discussion on consciousness to his explanation of the processing methods of the cerebral cortex, this is one of the best Kurzweil presentations I’ve ever seen.

I attended this year’s Singularity Summit, and had a great time. I remember some commenters at the Summit lamenting that Kurzweil started his talk rather slowly. However, I think the first 15 minutes of his presentation give some really valuable background to what he wants to discuss. Right away Kurzweil points out that the brain is not some mystic device, some quantumly unknowable system that we’ll never be able to understand. We can, for the first time in history, reliably peer inside the brain and see what’s happening. That’s an important step in creating a comprehensive map of how our brain behaves. But in terms of AI, we may not really need that map. Kurzweil explains that reverse engineering the brain isn’t absolutely necessary to develop artificial intelligence, it is just that understanding the brain can help us augment our pursuit of AI rather well. He relates how we’ve already had success with determining how the brain understands speech and visual input. These pattern recognition tasks have given us insight into how the rest of the organ processes information. With this context, Kurzweil’s ready to jump into the future of creating artificial minds.

…But first he takes a bit of a detour. At 14:45 he starts to discuss the reasons why some people believe in the Singularity and others do not. Importantly, he points out that education, intelligence, and age aren’t the determining factors. Glad to hear that the people who disagree with the concept of the Singularity aren’t dumb, ignorant, or childish. At 17:44 he starts back towards the brain, explaining how the cerebral cortex is composed of modules, which he calls recognizers, that serve as linked labels for real world objects and metaphysical ideas. …and then he gets away from the mind again. From 19:00 to 25:15 he shows evidence supporting the theory that information technologies have experienced exponential growth. For those who have seen Kurzweil speak before you can skip that part of the video. If this is your first Kurzweil presentation I have some bad news: Singularity Institute didn’t include the slides in the video. Luckily I tracked down a similar presentation he gave to Google in 2009 (see it below). You can see all the graphs of exponential curves you’d ever want by checking out slides 5 through 44.

The real meat of the presentation starts up after 25:00 when Kurzweil really gets into exploring concepts related to the brain. Jump to that point in the video and you won’t be disappointed. Slides 56 through 71 in the Google presentation are helpful to look through while you listen to him speak.

Unfortunately, Kurzweil was not able to appear in person for the Singularity Summit, instead he teleconferenced in. I was in the auditorium for the presentation, and I remember him looking a little like a giant floating head, but luckily you’ll miss out on that when you see the video below.

**UPDATE 12.21.10 The video seems to have been taken down, we are actively working to resolve this issue.**
**UPDATE 12.22.10 The video is now back up! A better quality version, without the freezing halfway through, will be available soon. Thanks to Michael Annissimov and Singularity Institute for all the help.**
**UPDATE 1.10.10 A new video, without the freezes, is now available. It’s included here.**

Here are the slides from Kurzweil’s presentation at Google in July of 2009.

Part of why I like this presentation so much is that Kurzweil fills it with memorable statements that encourage the audience to learn more about the nature of their minds. At 26:04 he explains that consciousness, in its very nature, is not measurable. It is a subjective evaluation, not an objective one. Science is simply not going to be able to have a definitive test for consciousness. That’s very appealing to me as both a challenge to experimentalists, and a launching point for philosophers. At 27:30, Kurzweil explains how thoughts create the brain saying, “we create who we are by the thoughts we have.” Our thought patterns are literally rewiring our brain and our brain’s wiring is influencing our thoughts. Speaking from experience, that’s a wonderfully interesting concept to explore with friends over coffee late at night. At 39:25 he states that, “…the cerebral cortex is a LISP processor.” Referencing the computer language LISP that uses linked lists as a data structure. Kurzweil describes the cortex as filled with units (“recognizers”) that build complex concepts out of links to other concepts. That’s a delightful (and apparently accurate) way to understand the way our minds learn, and again, something fun to discuss with friends or inspire you to read a book about neuroscience. It also jives very well with Jeff Hawkins’ theories about the brain. Hawkins is the founder of Palm, Handspring, and most recently Numenta, a company that uses the architecture of the brain to help design narrow artificial intelligence for interesting things such as sorting through video footage. We here at the Hub are fans of Hawkins, and it’s nice to see that apparently Kurzweil is too.

Further memorable sections:
43:00 – Kurweil discusses spindle neurons and the importance they have in our higher reasoning.
45:00 – He explains that we can only really test our perceptions of consciousness, not consciousness itself.
52:00 – The ‘Duck Theory’ of consciousness: If something looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, etc it’s probably a duck. In the same way, humanity will likely decide to accept artificial entities as ‘alive’ when they do the things that our consciousnesses do, even if we don’t have a test.
55:00 – Questions begin: 1) Is it possible the quantum wave function is a mental field? 2) How accurately do we need to model the brain to get intelligence? Neurons, subcellular, macromolecular? 3) Is scanning a human brain to the molecular level necessary before we get AI?

I should say that this presentation at the Singularity Summit has become a little frustrating to me. Around minute 30, Kurzweil starts to discuss the amount of code it would take to simulate a brain. A poor interpretation of these comments lead to PZ Myers, a researcher and blogger of some renown, to trash the entire presentation. We covered Myers’ original blog posting, as well as Kurzweil’s response, when it happened. As such I won’t go into the debate too much here. Suffice to say that Kurzweil believes that our brains are encoded by our DNA, which represents a reasonable amount of code to try to simulate/recreate in the future. However, he also states outright that a simulated brain will need to be ‘taught’ because experience is a key element in the development of a mind (watch around 29:35). Myers seems to have missed all this and concluded that Kurzweil had a laughable naive comprehension of the complexity of the brain. Ugh. Misunderstandings such as these are not the best basis for reasonable debate.

Over the years Kurzweil’s name has become somewhat synonymous with the Singularity. That’s to be expected, I guess, since he has written so many books that have directly or indirectly discussed the topic. I often lament that equivalence because it opens up a complex intellectual concept to boring ad hominem counter arguments. Today, however, I’m rather glad that Kurzweil is so often portrayed as the leader of the Singularity. He doesn’t always have the best stage presence, but it’s hard to ignore the depth of thought and clarity of vision he brings to his presentations. At the Singularity Summit Kurzweil painted a detailed picture of the brain as we know it today, and the way we may delve it more deeply in the future. I look forward to reading his upcoming book to see how he expands upon these ideas.

[image credits: R. Kurzweil via Slideshare.net]
[screen capture and video credit: Singularity Institute]
[source: Singularity Summit 2010]

An industrial robot lets researchers at Max Planck experience some intense racing and flying simulations.

Give engineers any excuse, and they’re going to find a way to combine robots and video games. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics created a top notch formula one simulator, called Cyber Motion, that puts the driving at the end of an enormous industrial robot arm. Why? Because it’s awesome. Oh, and there’s some science, too. Racing a real F-1 car isn’t like playing your average video game. There are strong forces pulling you into your seat as you round turns, and nauseating drops as you pass over hills at high speeds. Paolo Robuffo Giordana and his colleagues developed a closed loop feedback system so that the controls of the virtual car would move the robot in the right way to simulate those forces. The same robot rig has been used for flight simulators as well. Watch how riding Cyber Motion’s robot arm puts you in the F-1 driver’s seat in the video below. Anybody have a ticket to Germany I could borrow?

Cyber Motion’s robotic arm is a modified form of the Kuka-500 called the Robocoaster, which you can see in various theme parks across the globe. As such, Giordana and his colleagues weren’t providing anything extraordinary in terms of robotics, or even racing simulations (which was created using MATLAB). As they presented at ICRA 2010, the real improvement here is that they created the feedback system that translates how changes in the simulator should affect the robotic arm. You really wouldn’t travel up and down five feet when in an F-1 (at least not in a turn), but that motion is what makes you feel the gees that a real formula one racer experiences. Because the Kuka-500 is a six-axis arm with a wide range of motion, and a high maximum payload, the Cyber Motion can simulate more extreme circumstances than other systems that have been created.

As we venture into creating realistic virtual reality worlds, we’ll push ourselves into situations that are increasingly difficult to simulate. The work with flight and formula 1 simulators at Max Planck shows that robotics will be a key ingredient in getting you to experience the fictional world as realistically as possible. We should keep in mind, however, that the robot system in question doesn’t always have to cost a million dollars. Many of you may have seen the following video earlier in the year, it shows an amazing “home-made” F-1 simulator that has robotic pistons to simulate gees in much the same way as the Cyber Motion does. Though not to the same degree. I doubt we’ll ever see the Cyber Motion in your home, but this thing could fit in my living room (really, honey, it would look great with the curtains). Curiously, despite all the popularity of this home-made sim, no one seems to know exactly where it came from. Sounds like they’re speaking Czech, and that may be Live for Speed on the screen, but it’s anybody’s guess as to the identity of the badasses who created this rig.

No matter which formula one simulator you prefer, it’s clear that the best virtual reality is going to require some advanced robotics. That, or we need to start running wires into your brain.

[image credit: Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics]
[video credits: Max Planck via IEEE Spectrum, 1981israr - original source unknown.]
[sources: Max Planck]

The Blue Brain Project was able to simulate part of the brain during a thought.

Many of you, like me, are excited about the possibilities of modeling and simulating the human brain. The Blue Brain Project, based in Switzerland, and made possible by IBM, is one of the leading endeavors to understand how the brain functions and how we can build a computer that will simulate those functions for us to explore. If our earlier article on the Blue Brain Project left you eager to learn more, check out the new presentation that Project Director Henry Markram gave as part of Seed Magazine‘s Seed Design Series. The 15 minute video is embedded after the break.

If you want to understand something, it helps to be able to explore it, tinker with it, and watch how it works. Computer simulations allows scientists to do just that. For an instrument as complex and beautiful as the human brain, a simulation would require enormous resources. Markram estimates that it will take computers 20,000 times more powerful than any produced today, and with memory capacity 500 times the current size of the Internet. We’re talking exaflops worth of computing power and peta or exabytes of memory stored. Yet Markram seems confident we can reach these goals in about 10 years.

Markram does a good job of breaking down Blue Brain’s approach, as does our earlier article, so I won’t repeat it all. The focus of the simulation is the neocortex, specifically microprocessors in neocortical columns. So far BBP has been able to make 3D models, examining the over 400 types of neurons, electrical signal profiles, protein profiles, connectivity patterns, and signal languages in the neocortex. The journey through the brain that Markram gives you is really cool, especially when he reveals it’s only at 10% density of the actual brain. Apparently neurons are more densely packed than geeks at a comicon.

BBP is not an effort to create an artificial intelligence, it’s an attempt to model how the brain works. As such, its ability to help us explore and treat brain disease has great potential. Markram touches briefly on medical applications such as researching Autism near 12:02.

The modeling and simulating of the human brain is a herculean feat, and many detractors claim it can never be fully accomplished. Some wonder if a simulation can even discover anything new as it is only based on supplied information not nature itself. While I can’t address the latter, I know that the scope of the project shouldn’t let you scoff at Markram’s 10 year prediction. After all, the Human Genome Project seemed equally daunting, but was achieved with historic results. Whether it takes a decade, or more, I look forward to a time when humans can explore a virtual version of the instrument that allows them to explore the world.