6 ms·

Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind

57 points by jlhamilton 14y ago

confluence 14y ago
Let's get this straight: Ray Kurzweil is just a few ticks off crazy. Outside of Moore's law graphs (which he didn't discover), his predictions quickly veer off course into crazy land, especially in the case of diets and theories on intelligence (which others have routinely criticized him for - see everywhere). But here's the problem I have with Ray Kurzweil and other people like him - you can't just ignore them, you can't just write them off. He's like the Joker. A guy that makes proclamations on the edge of what's reasonable, and when he's right, he's really right - and the results of what he thinks are about to happen will really screw us all. I think this of all slightly off kilter people, Peter Thiel, Aubrey de Grey, Sean Parker, Elon Musk (the least off kilter of the bunch - most rational - but man, does this guy take insane risks - I'm long TSLA :), Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis (he is amongst one of the worst on the proclamations) - these are people who should be listened to, not because anything that they actually say makes any sense - because they often don't. No, they should be listened to because of the very nature of their personalities. The way their personalities are set up makes them act like early black swan detection devices. This allows them to call the black swans out well before they're apparent to the rest of us. More often than not, they're wrong though. They're like the canaries in the coal mine. Vigilant, plenty of false alarms, and usually ignored most of the time. But sometimes these people, they are just so fucking right - that you better hope you are on the right side of the wave they just called out. Too many people have been screwed thinking that the crazy fool talking about crazy things should be ignored. The counterfactual is also true: > All prophets are false prophets. So watch these guys out of the corner of your eye, don't take them too seriously most of the time, but if things come up, again and again and again - take notice, think carefully and make your own decisions. They are just early warning detection systems - it's up to you to make the final decision as to whether or not it's time to fire the nuke (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov).
- NathanKP 14y ago
  I'm curious what it is about Elon Musk in particular you consider to be "off kilter".
  - confluence 14y ago
    Please note that he's probably the least off kilter and by far the most rational/works more from first principles than analogy of the bunch. He quit a PhD in physics at Stanford to go chase the internet with ~$2K in his bank account. He then invested the $20 million (all in) he got from Zip2 straight back into X.com which later became PayPal through what can only be described as a series of random accidents that lead to its eBay sale. That's insane risk for someone who essentially had fuck you money. He then subsequently plowed the $300 or so million from the sale of PayPal to eBay, and pushed it directly into both SpaceX and Tesla - well before NASA or the world really had any need for either one of them - there was no guarantee that NASA would need SpaceX, or that COTS would continue to have government support (SpaceX bootstrapped on these contracts), or that any launch vendor would go with him over proven tech. And with Tesla, there was no guarantee that laptops/smartphones/tablets would explode from 2005-2010, driving down the cost of Li-on batteries by an order of magnitude as South Asia's factories came online with their economies of scale, hundreds of millions of people and hundreds of billions in surplus capital that all combined to help make electric cars and an upstart car company price competitive with established luxury car brands. There can be no doubt about it - Elon Musk takes huge risks, he is very lucky, and these are not the actions of a normal person. Normal people do not do these things - the risks he took were abominations on a risk adjusted scale (if the recession continued to decimate the economy and kill demand for veblen goods and SpaceX didn't get that 4th launch - Musk would be done - as in out of money and out of luck). Which reminds me - the best investors are mentally damaged in some way, especially in terms of emotion (a distinct lack of empathy and emotion). Because, if they weren't, well, they'd do what everyone else did, and be just like them. To be contrarian, is to be damaged. This does not mean that any of the people are mentally damaged - I merely found the studies on the relative percentages of functional psychopaths in leadership and investing positions highly curious (http://sgforums.com/forums/2092/topics/154210 http://sgforums.com/forums/2092/topics/154210).
jansen 14y ago
In the preface to the book Kurzweil argues, with good reason, that “reverse-engineering the human brain may be regarded as the most important project in the universe.” - for anyone interested, the Human Brain Project is at the forefront of this: http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/12/tech/human-brain-computer/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/12/tech/human-brain-computer/inde...
jfaucett 14y ago
"The challenge of figuring out how the mind works is too complicated for even the smartest of entrepreneurs to solve on their own." I would agree with that statement. The main problem is still simply understanding exactly how the brain works. PRTM I think is just one model that describes a type of functionality, as noted in the article there seem to be many more, and certainly we don't know enough about how the brain itself works. Once we have good well tested models for the functionality there I don't forsee any major problems in holding us back from replicating a brain ie. AI or singularity or whatever.
jere 14y ago
>As Kurzweil fleshes it out, the P.R.T.M. is even more like the Hierarchical Temporary Memory system proposed several years ago by his fellow entrepreneur Jeff Hawkins (who founded PalmPilot). Kurzweil’s weak efforts at differentiating his theory from Hawkins’s—“the most important difference is the set of parameters that I have included for each input … especially the size and size variability parameters”—are likely to convince no one. Yup. That's what I thought when the book was announced and I said this: >So is this On Intelligence 2? I find being an armchair cynic is even easier than being an armchair futurist, since I haven't read either book (the rip off is clear from the synopsis).
acabal 14y ago
Long ago I read Kurzweil's "Spiritual Machines," because people kept saying he was a smart guy, and AI intrigues me. It was the first and last book of his I read. It literally had me laughing out loud at the sheer ridiculousness of his predictions and the pomposity with which he delivered them. I remember thinking to myself, "Everybody thinks this guy is a genius--but he's just writing bad sci-fi! How is he fooling everyone? What's going on here?!" Looks like his new stuff is more of the same...
omarchowdhury 14y ago
Kurzweil is the epitome of [reductionist, emergentist] materialism. The essence of this sentence is not in the individual letters.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- skyhook_mockups 14y ago
  Sorry, not sure if I'm understanding you correctly. Are you arguing that there is more to consciousness than just the atoms in our brains? If so what is your reason for thinking this?
  - omarchowdhury 14y ago
    “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.” Max Planck
    - thirdtruck 14y ago
      What is this ultimate mystery? If you posit "why anything exists instead of nothing", then I will have to ask whether "why" even makes sense in this context. From what we now know of quantum physics, "nothingness" itself might be either less likely than having anything or perhaps nothing but a fiction born of our mental heuristics.
  - btilly 14y ago
    You missed the point of that well-put criticism. Kurzweil can identify the basic components that make up a working human brain, and concludes that if you put together a similar assemblage of components, what you'll get is going to be a working human brain. The problem is that we're not sure we have all of the right components, we're not sure of how those components need to interact, we're not sure of what subtle patterns have arisen through evolution to head off design traps that we're not even aware of. In short, yes we may be confident that we are described by physical processes, and intelligence is an emergent phenomena. But it is by no means guaranteed that when we put our components together that we'll get will be intelligent. Or if it is, then how similar to us it will be. So far what I've said can be dismissed as abstract hypothesizing (of course so can the bulk of Kurzweil's work), so let me give a concrete example to worry you. Humans have an innate ability at language. If you have deaf twins who never encounter a language that they can understand, they will invent one complete with a consistent grammar. (This experiment has been conducted by accident.) Other primates have no such innate ability at language. We've managed to teach chimps sign language, but they have been unable to master grammar. There is a gene, FOXPRO2, that has 2 point mutations between us and chimps. Humans who lack either of those point mutations have extreme grammar problems. There is therefore clear evidence that putting together a primate brain is NOT SUFFICIENT to get language. Whatever it is that FOXPRO2 does differently between us and chimps is necessary for language. The problem is that we don't know what FOXPRO2 is actually doing differently between us and chimps. We've recently shown that if you put our version of FOXPRO2 into mice, they behave differently. We can catalog the differences but we don't know why that happens. Now suppose that we wire something artificial together that we think should be similar in capacity to a human brain. Given that we don't know what FOXPRO2 actually is doing to our brains, what are the chances that our artificial model manages to capture the necessary tweaks that FOXPRO2 makes in brain function for language function? My bet is, "A lot lower than Kurzweil would have people believe."
unoti 14y ago
I'm not sure why there's so much vitriol about Kurzweil. Maybe it's disappointment that we don't have our brain uploads ready yet, just like we were pissed about no flying cars twenty years ago. He doesn't have to be right all the time to be worth at least considering his ideas without getting so angry. "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle Maybe the title is too sensationalist. But even something like "A New Kind of Science" may not have been so earth shattering, but it was still a lot of fun to read and play with.
- saraid216 14y ago
  Your defense of Kurzweil amounts to "He came up with an AI version of Schrodinger's Cat." That's a lot less impressive than I think you intended.
- rpm4321 14y ago
  Yeah, I don't get the recent backlash with Kurzweil on HN. I understand being critical of some of his conclusions, but he's had a pretty impressive career before becoming an author, and quite frankly he has the best track record out there on predicting the future. It's amazing how accurate his Age of Spiritual Machines predictions became, even if some of them were a year or two late. Google's self-driving car, ipads, Siri, Watson, Google Glass, etc. He seems to always get technological capability correct, but sometimes misses the mark on technological adoption. Even if a few of his more outlandish predictions like immortality are a few decades - or even generations - off, I think the road map of technological progress he outlines seems pretty inevitable, yet still awe inspiring.
jaxytee 14y ago
Even though Ray's futurist predictions can be looney at times, in his book "Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever" he provides a lot of useful/applicable insights into the state of modern medicine. Like how flawed our "pay per medical service" system is, or how heart disease is preventable in almost all instances (but still kills Americans more than anything else), or how most modern humans in the US have diet's and exercise habits (or lack there of) that are extremely detrimental to our bodies and their pre civilization biological programming. Our bodies firmware is indisputably out of date and no one seems to care or acknowledge this fact. I'd rather have Ray and the likes pointing these facts out and imagining a future in which someone uses technology to change them vs criticizing them for not being able to predict the future on a %100 clip. They may introduce the problems to the minds that come along and solve them one day.
briggers 14y ago
> Hierarchical Temporary Memory Temporal. It's such a jarring mistake that it looks more like misunderstanding than a typo. He dismisses the concept of immortality out of hand, which is frustrating. Where I live the life expectancy has increased by 20 years over the last 50. I'll bet glide ratios were also improving before powered-flight happened. He is also somehow unaware of the advances in the last decade in machine intelligence. At the consumer level, this should be as obvious as doing a search on Google. Long-hold your iPhone home button to see pretty good voice recognition, or try Google's and be blown away. Even a little deeper, there are many modern businesses with machine intelligence as part of their very fabric. If you've confused artificial personhood with artificial intelligence then it's an understandable mistake, otherwise not. A useless distraction.
- jacquesm 14y ago
  > Where I live the life expectancy has increased by 20 years over the last 50. But maximum life expectancy has been stuck at 130 or so for as long as there have been people. The fact that more people live longer does not mean that suddenly we'll all live forever. Forever is a long long time, besides having to define forever (presumably as something > 130), the whole rapture of the nerds thing is more driven by a fear of death. The various religious have been selling that particular snake oil for thousands of years, it is not surprising that those outside religion would yearn for a pseudo-scientific version of it. It makes for some interesting science fiction but I think it is a fairly safe bet to say that you'll die a regular death.
  - orangecat 14y ago
    the whole rapture of the nerds thing is more driven by a fear of death "Being scared of death is like being scared of a great big monster with poisonous fangs. It actually makes a great deal of sense, and does not, in fact, indicate that you have a psychological problem." - Harry Potter (the version from http://hpmor.com http://hpmor.com) The various religious have been selling that particular snake oil for thousands of years True. The difference is that science might actually work. I think it is a fairly safe bet to say that you'll die a regular death. Most likely. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do something about the annihilation of billions of sentient beings.
ashcairo 14y ago
I love this part: "Google built the largest pattern recognizer of them all, a system running on sixteen thousand processor cores that analyzed ten million YouTube videos and managed to learn, all by itself, to recognize cats and faces" with 15.8 percent accuracy.
- bloaf 14y ago
  Its interesting and all, but compare it to a human baby. It takes them several months of data processing to learn things like object permanence. While 16 thousand processor cores may seem like a lot, I seriously doubt it even approached 1/10th of the power of a babies brain. Indeed, I doubt it was even 1/10th of the power of the region of the babies brain dedicated to recognizing objects.

57 points by jlhamilton 14y ago

Let's get this straight: Ray Kurzweil is just a few ticks off crazy. Outside of Moore's law graphs (which he didn't discover), his predictions quickly veer off course into crazy land, especially in the case of diets and theories on intelligence (which others have routinely criticized him for - see everywhere). But here's the problem I have with Ray Kurzweil and other people like him - you can't just ignore them, you can't just write them off. He's like the Joker. A guy that makes proclamations on the edge of what's reasonable, and when he's right, he's really right - and the results of what he thinks are about to happen will really screw us all. I think this of all slightly off kilter people, Peter Thiel, Aubrey de Grey, Sean Parker, Elon Musk (the least off kilter of the bunch - most rational - but man, does this guy take insane risks - I'm long TSLA :), Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis (he is amongst one of the worst on the proclamations) - these are people who should be listened to, not because anything that they actually say makes any sense - because they often don't. No, they should be listened to because of the very nature of their personalities. The way their personalities are set up makes them act like early black swan detection devices. This allows them to call the black swans out well before they're apparent to the rest of us. More often than not, they're wrong though. They're like the canaries in the coal mine. Vigilant, plenty of false alarms, and usually ignored most of the time. But sometimes these people, they are just so fucking right - that you better hope you are on the right side of the wave they just called out. Too many people have been screwed thinking that the crazy fool talking about crazy things should be ignored. The counterfactual is also true: > All prophets are false prophets. So watch these guys out of the corner of your eye, don't take them too seriously most of the time, but if things come up, again and again and again - take notice, think carefully and make your own decisions. They are just early warning detection systems - it's up to you to make the final decision as to whether or not it's time to fire the nuke (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov).

NathanKP 14y ago
I'm curious what it is about Elon Musk in particular you consider to be "off kilter".
- confluence 14y ago
  Please note that he's probably the least off kilter and by far the most rational/works more from first principles than analogy of the bunch. He quit a PhD in physics at Stanford to go chase the internet with ~$2K in his bank account. He then invested the $20 million (all in) he got from Zip2 straight back into X.com which later became PayPal through what can only be described as a series of random accidents that lead to its eBay sale. That's insane risk for someone who essentially had fuck you money. He then subsequently plowed the $300 or so million from the sale of PayPal to eBay, and pushed it directly into both SpaceX and Tesla - well before NASA or the world really had any need for either one of them - there was no guarantee that NASA would need SpaceX, or that COTS would continue to have government support (SpaceX bootstrapped on these contracts), or that any launch vendor would go with him over proven tech. And with Tesla, there was no guarantee that laptops/smartphones/tablets would explode from 2005-2010, driving down the cost of Li-on batteries by an order of magnitude as South Asia's factories came online with their economies of scale, hundreds of millions of people and hundreds of billions in surplus capital that all combined to help make electric cars and an upstart car company price competitive with established luxury car brands. There can be no doubt about it - Elon Musk takes huge risks, he is very lucky, and these are not the actions of a normal person. Normal people do not do these things - the risks he took were abominations on a risk adjusted scale (if the recession continued to decimate the economy and kill demand for veblen goods and SpaceX didn't get that 4th launch - Musk would be done - as in out of money and out of luck). Which reminds me - the best investors are mentally damaged in some way, especially in terms of emotion (a distinct lack of empathy and emotion). Because, if they weren't, well, they'd do what everyone else did, and be just like them. To be contrarian, is to be damaged. This does not mean that any of the people are mentally damaged - I merely found the studies on the relative percentages of functional psychopaths in leadership and investing positions highly curious (http://sgforums.com/forums/2092/topics/154210 http://sgforums.com/forums/2092/topics/154210).

jansen 14y ago

In the preface to the book Kurzweil argues, with good reason, that “reverse-engineering the human brain may be regarded as the most important project in the universe.” - for anyone interested, the Human Brain Project is at the forefront of this: http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/12/tech/human-brain-computer/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/12/tech/human-brain-computer/inde...

jfaucett 14y ago

"The challenge of figuring out how the mind works is too complicated for even the smartest of entrepreneurs to solve on their own." I would agree with that statement. The main problem is still simply understanding exactly how the brain works. PRTM I think is just one model that describes a type of functionality, as noted in the article there seem to be many more, and certainly we don't know enough about how the brain itself works. Once we have good well tested models for the functionality there I don't forsee any major problems in holding us back from replicating a brain ie. AI or singularity or whatever.

jere 14y ago

>As Kurzweil fleshes it out, the P.R.T.M. is even more like the Hierarchical Temporary Memory system proposed several years ago by his fellow entrepreneur Jeff Hawkins (who founded PalmPilot). Kurzweil’s weak efforts at differentiating his theory from Hawkins’s—“the most important difference is the set of parameters that I have included for each input … especially the size and size variability parameters”—are likely to convince no one. Yup. That's what I thought when the book was announced and I said this: >So is this On Intelligence 2? I find being an armchair cynic is even easier than being an armchair futurist, since I haven't read either book (the rip off is clear from the synopsis).

acabal 14y ago

Long ago I read Kurzweil's "Spiritual Machines," because people kept saying he was a smart guy, and AI intrigues me. It was the first and last book of his I read. It literally had me laughing out loud at the sheer ridiculousness of his predictions and the pomposity with which he delivered them. I remember thinking to myself, "Everybody thinks this guy is a genius--but he's just writing bad sci-fi! How is he fooling everyone? What's going on here?!" Looks like his new stuff is more of the same...

omarchowdhury 14y ago

Kurzweil is the epitome of [reductionist, emergentist] materialism. The essence of this sentence is not in the individual letters.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
skyhook_mockups 14y ago
Sorry, not sure if I'm understanding you correctly. Are you arguing that there is more to consciousness than just the atoms in our brains? If so what is your reason for thinking this?
- omarchowdhury 14y ago
  “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.” Max Planck
  - thirdtruck 14y ago
    What is this ultimate mystery? If you posit "why anything exists instead of nothing", then I will have to ask whether "why" even makes sense in this context. From what we now know of quantum physics, "nothingness" itself might be either less likely than having anything or perhaps nothing but a fiction born of our mental heuristics.
- btilly 14y ago
  You missed the point of that well-put criticism. Kurzweil can identify the basic components that make up a working human brain, and concludes that if you put together a similar assemblage of components, what you'll get is going to be a working human brain. The problem is that we're not sure we have all of the right components, we're not sure of how those components need to interact, we're not sure of what subtle patterns have arisen through evolution to head off design traps that we're not even aware of. In short, yes we may be confident that we are described by physical processes, and intelligence is an emergent phenomena. But it is by no means guaranteed that when we put our components together that we'll get will be intelligent. Or if it is, then how similar to us it will be. So far what I've said can be dismissed as abstract hypothesizing (of course so can the bulk of Kurzweil's work), so let me give a concrete example to worry you. Humans have an innate ability at language. If you have deaf twins who never encounter a language that they can understand, they will invent one complete with a consistent grammar. (This experiment has been conducted by accident.) Other primates have no such innate ability at language. We've managed to teach chimps sign language, but they have been unable to master grammar. There is a gene, FOXPRO2, that has 2 point mutations between us and chimps. Humans who lack either of those point mutations have extreme grammar problems. There is therefore clear evidence that putting together a primate brain is NOT SUFFICIENT to get language. Whatever it is that FOXPRO2 does differently between us and chimps is necessary for language. The problem is that we don't know what FOXPRO2 is actually doing differently between us and chimps. We've recently shown that if you put our version of FOXPRO2 into mice, they behave differently. We can catalog the differences but we don't know why that happens. Now suppose that we wire something artificial together that we think should be similar in capacity to a human brain. Given that we don't know what FOXPRO2 actually is doing to our brains, what are the chances that our artificial model manages to capture the necessary tweaks that FOXPRO2 makes in brain function for language function? My bet is, "A lot lower than Kurzweil would have people believe."

unoti 14y ago

I'm not sure why there's so much vitriol about Kurzweil. Maybe it's disappointment that we don't have our brain uploads ready yet, just like we were pissed about no flying cars twenty years ago. He doesn't have to be right all the time to be worth at least considering his ideas without getting so angry. "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle Maybe the title is too sensationalist. But even something like "A New Kind of Science" may not have been so earth shattering, but it was still a lot of fun to read and play with.

saraid216 14y ago
Your defense of Kurzweil amounts to "He came up with an AI version of Schrodinger's Cat." That's a lot less impressive than I think you intended.
rpm4321 14y ago
Yeah, I don't get the recent backlash with Kurzweil on HN. I understand being critical of some of his conclusions, but he's had a pretty impressive career before becoming an author, and quite frankly he has the best track record out there on predicting the future. It's amazing how accurate his Age of Spiritual Machines predictions became, even if some of them were a year or two late. Google's self-driving car, ipads, Siri, Watson, Google Glass, etc. He seems to always get technological capability correct, but sometimes misses the mark on technological adoption. Even if a few of his more outlandish predictions like immortality are a few decades - or even generations - off, I think the road map of technological progress he outlines seems pretty inevitable, yet still awe inspiring.

jaxytee 14y ago

Even though Ray's futurist predictions can be looney at times, in his book "Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever" he provides a lot of useful/applicable insights into the state of modern medicine. Like how flawed our "pay per medical service" system is, or how heart disease is preventable in almost all instances (but still kills Americans more than anything else), or how most modern humans in the US have diet's and exercise habits (or lack there of) that are extremely detrimental to our bodies and their pre civilization biological programming. Our bodies firmware is indisputably out of date and no one seems to care or acknowledge this fact. I'd rather have Ray and the likes pointing these facts out and imagining a future in which someone uses technology to change them vs criticizing them for not being able to predict the future on a %100 clip. They may introduce the problems to the minds that come along and solve them one day.

briggers 14y ago

> Hierarchical Temporary Memory Temporal. It's such a jarring mistake that it looks more like misunderstanding than a typo. He dismisses the concept of immortality out of hand, which is frustrating. Where I live the life expectancy has increased by 20 years over the last 50. I'll bet glide ratios were also improving before powered-flight happened. He is also somehow unaware of the advances in the last decade in machine intelligence. At the consumer level, this should be as obvious as doing a search on Google. Long-hold your iPhone home button to see pretty good voice recognition, or try Google's and be blown away. Even a little deeper, there are many modern businesses with machine intelligence as part of their very fabric. If you've confused artificial personhood with artificial intelligence then it's an understandable mistake, otherwise not. A useless distraction.

jacquesm 14y ago
> Where I live the life expectancy has increased by 20 years over the last 50. But maximum life expectancy has been stuck at 130 or so for as long as there have been people. The fact that more people live longer does not mean that suddenly we'll all live forever. Forever is a long long time, besides having to define forever (presumably as something > 130), the whole rapture of the nerds thing is more driven by a fear of death. The various religious have been selling that particular snake oil for thousands of years, it is not surprising that those outside religion would yearn for a pseudo-scientific version of it. It makes for some interesting science fiction but I think it is a fairly safe bet to say that you'll die a regular death.
- orangecat 14y ago
  the whole rapture of the nerds thing is more driven by a fear of death "Being scared of death is like being scared of a great big monster with poisonous fangs. It actually makes a great deal of sense, and does not, in fact, indicate that you have a psychological problem." - Harry Potter (the version from http://hpmor.com http://hpmor.com) The various religious have been selling that particular snake oil for thousands of years True. The difference is that science might actually work. I think it is a fairly safe bet to say that you'll die a regular death. Most likely. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do something about the annihilation of billions of sentient beings.

ashcairo 14y ago

I love this part: "Google built the largest pattern recognizer of them all, a system running on sixteen thousand processor cores that analyzed ten million YouTube videos and managed to learn, all by itself, to recognize cats and faces" with 15.8 percent accuracy.

bloaf 14y ago
Its interesting and all, but compare it to a human baby. It takes them several months of data processing to learn things like object permanence. While 16 thousand processor cores may seem like a lot, I seriously doubt it even approached 1/10th of the power of a babies brain. Indeed, I doubt it was even 1/10th of the power of the region of the babies brain dedicated to recognizing objects.