I've skimmed through that book and looked at the API over at Numenta: http://www.numenta.com/. They are focused on practical pattern recognition applications. Kurzweil has always been about strong AI and almost sci-fi type scenarios in his books. It's a way more ambitious goal, but he has predicted a lot of things correctly before. I'd check out some of his earlier books beforehand, just to get a better idea of his mindset.