• http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/interviews/v7i01_kurzweil.html

The ACM online journal Ubiquity features an interview with futurist/genius/inventor Ray Kurzweil in the January 10-17, 2006, issue. The interview focuses on his new book The Singularity is Near, which includes statements like "We'll have sufficient hardware to recreate human intelligence pretty soon. We'll have it in a supercomputer by 2010." Pulled out of context, such statements seem, well, hyperbolic, but the interview touches on some points crucial for teaching and learning. Consider, for example, this exchange about pattern recognition and think about how it might connect to the discussion about experts and novices in works such as Brandsford et al's How People Learn:

UBIQUITY:: You see yourself as basically an expert in pattern recognition, correct?

KURZWEIL: Yes, that's my field of interest. We developed the first omni-font optical character recognition system, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition system. We're now working on electrocardiogram automatic diagnosis to create a smart undershirt for people with heart disease and conditions like that. So pattern recognition is my field of expertise.

UBIQUITY:: And so pattern recognition is the heart of ... what? Finish that sentence.

KURZWEIL: Pattern recognition is the heart of human intelligence. We're in fact not very good at logical thinking, analytical thinking. Computers are already much better at that than we are -- as is clear if you consider a math program like "Mathematica" that's very hard even for professionals and mathematicians to keep up with. And yet people are still better than machines at recognizing patterns. However, machines are getting better, and ultimately machines will be better than humans in all areas of pattern recognition. Of course, at that point, computers will have achieved human levels of intelligence, in the late 2020s. But human pattern recognition, though, is basically hardwired for certain types of patterns.