Jeff Hawkins turned the computer world upside down by inventing the Palm PDA and founding two companies that drove the handheld revolution, Palm Computing and Handspring. Now he's shaking things up again. In his new book, On Intelligence, Hawkins claims decades of AI research have failed miserably - and that his model of the human brain is about to give rise to the first true intelligent machines.
WIRED: You say we have "no productive theories about what intelligence is." Would you say that to Marvin Minsky?
HAWKINS: In the scientific or the computer science community, that wouldn't be controversial. AI has led to lots of innovations in computer science, but not to any truly intelligent machines or even any theories about how the brain works and what intelligence is.
Why not?
The idea of the Turing test was that a computer would be intelligent if it could mimic human behavior - we don't care what goes on in the brain, as long as we have the right output. But it does matter. Deep Blue playing chess is not intelligence.
Even when it routinely beats up on top grand masters?
My calculator does better arithmetic than I do, but I wouldn't call it intelligent. Deep Blue just plays chess. It can't tell you what the other chess player is eating for lunch.
You write that the brain doesn't compute answers, it retrieves them from memory.
The neural cortex is not like a computer. It's just a huge memory system. When I take a drink, I'm not calculating how to move my arms; I'm recalling sequences.
You can make machines work the same way?
I have a grad student building this stuff today. There's no big technical or scientific hurdle to overcome. Ten years from now, this is going to be a really exciting and hot industry. Personally, I think it will happen a lot quicker than that, in a matter of two or three years.
And then what? What will your memory machines do?
Imagine a machine that perceives large-scale objects like weather patterns. AI is about recreating what humans do. This technology will do things humans can't do.
- Lucas Graves
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