“Thus one route—arguably the most popular one—to inventing the Master Algorithm is to reverse engineer the brain. Jeff Hawkins took a stab at this in his book On Intelligence. Ray Kurzweil pins his hopes for the Singularity—the rise of artificial intelligence that greatly exceeds the human variety—on doing just that and takes a stab at it himself in his book How to Create a Mind. Nevertheless, this is only one of several possible approaches, as we’ll see.”