Episode description

In "How to Create a Mind, The Secret of Human Thought Revealed," futurist and author Ray Kurzweil explores the limitless potential of reverse engineering the human brain.

Ray Kurzweil is arguably today's most influential—and often controversial—futurist. In "How to Create a Mind," Kurzweil presents a provocative exploration of the most important project in human-machine civilization—reverse engineering the human brain to understand precisely how it works and using that knowledge to create even more intelligent machines. Kurzweil discusses how the brain functions, how the mind emerges from the brain, and the implications of vastly increasing the powers of our intelligence in addressing the world's problems. He thoughtfully examines emotional and moral intelligence and the origins of consciousness while envisioning the radical possibilities of our merging with the intelligent technology we are creating.

A prolific inventor, Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition software, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition software.

Originally published in November of 2012.

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