{"id":239706,"date":"2026-06-26T10:16:36","date_gmt":"2026-06-26T15:16:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/ray-kurzweil-on-how-to-create-a-mind-be-who-you-would-like-to-be"},"modified":"2026-06-26T10:16:36","modified_gmt":"2026-06-26T15:16:36","slug":"ray-kurzweil-on-how-to-create-a-mind-be-who-you-would-like-to-be","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/ray-kurzweil-on-how-to-create-a-mind-be-who-you-would-like-to-be","title":{"rendered":"Ray Kurzweil on How To Create A Mind: Be Who You Would Like To Be"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Fourteen years ago, I sat down in Ray Kurzweil\u2019s office in Boston, fumbled with a slipping lavalier mic, and asked the man whose book pulled me into this whole world a deceptively simple question: Can we reverse-engineer the human mind?<\/p>\n

What strikes me now, rewatching this, is how little the core debate has aged. Back in 2012, we argued about Watson, the Turing Test, whether AI deserves rights, and whether a machine would ever care about humanity\u2019s hardest problems. Swap a few names, and that is the front page today.<\/p>\n

But the line that has stayed with me all these years was not about #technology at all. When I asked Ray how a kid decides at age 5 to become an inventor, his answer ran counter to every productivity guru on the internet:<\/p>\n

\u201cDo not be too concerned about what is practical. Follow your passion and be who you would like to be.\u201d<\/p>\n

Coming from one of the most relentlessly practical inventors alive, the man behind the flat-bed scanner, text-to-speech, and the music synthesizer, that is not soft advice. It is a thesis about #innovation itself.<\/p>\n

There is a reason I keep coming back to this conversation when people ask me about the #singularity and #ArtificialIntelligence. Ray\u2019s optimism is famous. What gets missed is where he aims it.<\/p>\n

Continue reading \u201cRay Kurzweil on How To Create A Mind: Be Who You Would Like To Be\u201d | ><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fourteen years ago, I sat down in Ray Kurzweil\u2019s office in Boston, fumbled with a slipping lavalier mic, and asked the man whose book pulled me into this whole world a deceptively simple question: Can we reverse-engineer the human mind? What strikes me now, rewatching this, is how little the core debate has aged. Back [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":737,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42,2018,6,64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-239706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media-arts","category-ray-kurzweil","category-robotics-ai","category-singularity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/737"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239706"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239706\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}