Kurzweil’s book on how to create a mind is sure to bring some new spin, as well as plenty of debate to a highly controversial topic. Many claim that the human brain is too complex and too mysterious to be understood or replicated within our lifetimes, if ever.

Others (many who regularly read this site!) on the other hand, recognize that technologies such as Siri and IBM’s Watson have already made impressive progress in mimicking human intelligence.

In the next 20, 50, and 80 years, who is to say how far humankind will take this trend? Will human level intelligence, or even greater than human intelligence, be created entirely in machines and software, or perhaps in some combination of man and machine? Kurzweil would argue, in fact, that our smartphones connected to the cloud already represent an extension of our intelligence, and thus we already possess a very real form of superhuman intelligence relative to humans only a decade ago! […]