The book review in question is crap. I'm happy to read Kurzweil critics but claiming something is too complex to understand to does not make for legitimate criticism, in any field.
Pattern recognition is a given, how to do it is not. That is really what the book is about (hint: hierarchical hidden markov models.) As for the philosophical stuff, I read The Age of Spiritual Machines many years ago when it came out (and I was barely in high school), so there was nothing in How to Create A Mind that challenged views I've had over a decade to think about.
The whole issue of consciousness I think is minor. Which, I personally would explain consciousness as "living" awareness ( in the book Kurzweil says even the smartest people start to sound stupid when trying to describe this.)
The good news is our industry is not going to get dull anytime soon.
Perhaps I should read Kurzweil once even if just to see how much our views are aligned..
At no point did someone think a computer would wake up, sing Hallelujah, and start composing public policy when it finished playing checkers.
Consciousness is clearly: the ability to have directed agency in the world (i.e. "wanting" to do something), following an action path to create a desirable outcome, and forming opinions/judgements/actions based on prior experience ("memories"). Fun thought experiment: when does a baby become conscious and not just a bundle of predefined cry-poop-eat behaviors?
Every animal walking around in the world is consciousness (if you can "turn off agency" in the form of sedation during surgery, the thing was consciousness), but human-level intelligence consciousness only forms in our squishy brains at this point in our world line.
From a philosophical perspective it's saying that consciousness is a property of reality rather than of humans / animals and that we're merely choosing to define an essentially arbitrary subset of it that's sufficiently similar to our own as 'true consciousness'.
Saywhatnow?
consciousness is a property of reality
Again, saywhatnow? Perhaps your usage of 'reality' is throwing me off.
Consciousness is just a very high dimensional aggregation of "stuff" (e.g. synaptic connections) with a processing framework (e.g. neural architecture) for recall/storage/action based on outward perception and internal state.
We're both agreed that consciousness doesn't require squishy brains. I'm just saying human level consciousness, at this point in time, only exists in our squishy brains. We'll figure out different ways of creating computational consciousness in the future, but we aren't there yet.
Our tiny recommender systems, search engines, face detectors/recognizers, and "my first backprop neural net 101" aren't conscious.
Given that assumption, all I'm saying is that as computers progress along that scale we are currently continually moving the point on that scale at which something becomes "human level" to specifically exclude computers.
It seems that whenever computers become able to do something that we previously used to define consciousness, we just create a new definition of what it means to be human/conscious that doesn't include that new capability.
Essentially we're continuously redefining consciousness as "that which humans can that machines can't."
My guess is that we'll keep expanding that until human consciousness is just "the version that operates in flesh and blood rather than silicon".