I'd put Kurzweil's book down and pick up some more recent research. As the biologist P.Z. Myers once wrote, βRay Kurzweil is a genius. One of the greatest hucksters of the age.β The full New Yorker article, Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind[1], makes me question how relevant he is today.
Hey pdog this isn't really in response to you - it's more something that's been bothering me for awhile - but who the hell appointed Gary Marcus the arbiter of all things AI?
The New Yorker apparently hired this guy to be an AI columnist, and he has no background in either neuroscience or computer science, only psychology.
If you read his articles, he veers wildly from "strong AI ain't gonna happen" to "AI could destroy us all", the only common thread being pessimism. Meanwhile, he displays a frightening lack of understanding of the subject matter, and perhaps most disturbingly, in some of his more alarmist articles advocates that computer scientists should step aside and make room for psychologists, philosophers, lawyers, and politicians to sort out these thorny issues at the big boy table.
Kurzweil is certainly fair game for legitimate criticism, but Marcus calling Kurzweil a joke is an even big joke in itself.
I think that psychologist who didn't like the book didn't really understand the book. I also don't think that P.Z. Meyers ever understood much of what Kurzweil was talking about either.
My guess is that maybe some of the more biologically accurate spiking neural network simulations are more capable than the more typical neural nets that Kurzweil dismisses, but also less efficient than hierarchical hidden Markov models.
When I Google hierarchical hidden Markov models I see it being used in quite a lot of current research. I also see neural nets being mentioned, sometimes in the same project.
[1] - http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/ray-kurz...