Futurology

Jeff Hawkins is the founder of Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience in 2002 and Numenta in 2005. In his 2004 book titled On Intelligence, and in his research before and after, he and his team have worked to reverse-engineer the neocortex and propose artificial intelligence architectures, approaches, and ideas that are inspired by the human brain. His previous book, On Intelligence, was an impressive scientific journey into intelligence as a memory-prediction system for experiences and therefore vastly different than a computer. He compared a human brain’s neuron to two machine neurons: a traditional neural network neuron and his version of a more sophisticated one in the form of hierarchical temporal memory (HTM) cells. Almost 20 years later, he takes this earlier HTM concept to a higher plane and has truly established himself as both a formidable teacher and an ardent student of intelligence. His latest book, A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence, is framed in the construct of how the neo