Gordon Matilla---In the world of modern medicine, many things are possible. Doctors can transplant hearts, offer prosthetic limbs to those with severed legs, and can diagnose complex diseases, but can scientists replace the mind?
Ray Kurzweil is a well-known futurist whose ideas have often been found quaint by some and embraced by others. His latest book maintains the digital brain and mind is in our future.
Kurzweil's latest book, Tendencias 21, is on the New York Times best seller list. Kurzweil maintains that in only a few years the reverse engineering of the human brain will be finished and that by the year 2029 artificial intelligence will actually be developed to the point where it will be superior to human intelligence. His book examines how people think, then presents a model of the neocortex and raises his theory of mind, looking at the brain and its evolution. The brain has evolved and so has technology, with the latter capable of bringing superior intellect to advance technology even further.
Much of that artificial intelligence is already on the horizon. Science may not have the brain reproduced, but there are ways to fashion programs that can test mood and meaning of what a person says and does. Facebook hopes to harvest this information from their online social media site. It hopes to learn everything it can about you, and that can help its advertisers, its business associates, and help plan its network's future as well as the future for everyone who interacts with it. Zuckerberg layed out his plans today, in some details, letting the world know that what we think and do is something Facebook wants to use to offer its users more than it already does with its present offerings. They intend to do that not just about what is said on Facebook but even the types of photos a user posts.
And for those who want to keep up with the latest in Artificial Intelligence and sort through the research as it unfolds, an online site offers journal articles for the man or woman who wants to keep in the know and to use human intelligence and the human brain to understand what might be the replacement for both, according to futurist thinking.
