Andrej Karpathy mentioned How to Create a Mind by Ray Kurzweil 2 times

Kurzweil's book offers an overview of the biological brain and briefly overviews some attempts toward replicating its structure or function inside the computer. He also offers his own high-level ideas that are mostly a restatement of what can already be found in other books (such as Hawkins' On Intelligence) with a few modifications (he admits this himself though at one point, for which he gets bonus points). Finally, he applies his Law Of Accelerating Returns (LOAR) to field of AI and produces some predictions for the future of this field. The good: Nice thought experiments section, nice overview of the biological brain (both old brain/cortex and their function), reasonably ok philosophical mambo jambo parts about consciousness and whether it is possible for a computer to be a mind (if you're into that), some analysis of relevant computational trends. By the end, you're almost convinced we're almost there! The bad: First, his own theories are extremely vague and half-baked (though I forgive this. If he knew more he would be busier with things other than writing this book) and essentially reduce to some form of Hierarchical Hidden Markov Model. That's not especially exciting, I think most researchers in the field will agree on such high-level things. I also find it puzzling that he claims to be talking about the mind in its entirety, but then his exposition focuses almost entirely on temporal modeling/prediction aspects and mostly ignores a lot of other magical components of a mind, such as a flexible and efficient knowledge representation / inference engine, or a reinforcement learning - like actor /critic system that surely exists somewhere at the core of all of our learning and reasoning. All in all, I would recommend this book to anyone who's interested in some pointers to our efforts to replicate a brain in the computer, who wants to learn a bit about the biological brain, or who's into the philosophy of it all. 3/5

— Andrej Karpathy

2013-04-26 on goodreads.com

Good high level tour of AI, brain, past and future

— Andrej Karpathy