The following is a conversation with Jeff Hawkins. He's the founder of the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience in 2002, and NuMenta in 2005. In his 2004 book, titled On Intelligence, and in the research before and after, he and his team have worked to reverse engineer the neural cortex, and propose artificial intelligence architectures, approaches, and ideas that are inspired by the human brain. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| This is always a challenge when seeking more than small incremental steps forward in AI. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| My hope is that conversations like this can help provide an inspiring spark for new ideas. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| Are you more interested in understanding the human brain or in creating artificial systems that have many of the same qualities but don't necessarily require that you actually understand the underpinning workings of our mind? So there's a clear answer to that question. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| And within that, let me ask the impossible question, how do you, not define, but at least think about what it means to be intelligent? So I didn't try to answer that question first. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| Because intelligence isn't just like some mechanism and it's not just some capabilities. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| Well, so we'll get there. We'll get to the neocortex and some of the theories of how the whole thing works. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| Look, there's a long history of AI, as you know. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| They all have a value in the world. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| And I think the quickest way of bridging that gap is to figure out how the brain does that. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| It's just, people keep saying that. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| So there's no historical evidence that suggests this is the case, and I just never even consider that's a possibility. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| The pieces we don't know are clear to me, but the framework is all there, and it's like, oh, okay, we're gonna be able to do this. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| Yeah, sure. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| It's new because it didn't exist before mammals. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| And the old parts of the brain are, there's lots of pieces there. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| All the emotional centers of the brain are in the old part of the brain, so when you feel anger or hungry, lust, or things like that, those are all in the old parts of the brain. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| So that's like the rough division, and you obviously can't understand the neocortex completely isolated, but you can understand a lot of it with just a few interfaces to the old parts of the brain, and so it gives you a system to study. The other remarkable thing about the neocortex, compared to the old parts of the brain, is the neocortex is extremely uniform. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| Where if you look at the old parts of the brain, there's lots of little pieces do specific things. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| So language, hearing, touch, vision, engineering, all these things are basically underlying, are all built on the same computational substrate. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| It's like, yes, you see variations of it here and there, more of the cell, less and less, and so on. But what Malcastle argued was, he says, you know, if you take a section of neocortex, why is one a visual area and one is a auditory area? Or why is, and his answer was, it's because one is connected to eyes and one is connected to ears.

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