Peter Flaschner recently wrote an entry on his blog Almost Cool. In it he discussess how Jeff Hawkins concept of a memory model (from “On Intelligence“) could be used to discuss brands. Yes. But when he suggests that a map of a brand were possible I pointed out the following… Read more…

The memory-prediction framework that Jeff Hawkins proposes for the human mind in “On Intilligence” claims that human minds would have difficulty comprehending things that break from patterns that we’ve come to recognize in the real world. We can adjust of course, but it takes time. So maybe that’s why no matter how long I stare at this thing I can’t seem to visually predict what’s going to happen. Consciously, I can identify a new pattern but visually my eyes just “don’t get it”.

So this last weekend, I had just finished reading Jeff Hawkins’ great little tome, “On Intelligence” in which he lays out a hypothesis for how the human neocortex works and then goes on to discuss how we could build intelligent machines based on the model he presents. Then, of course, the rat-brain flying the plane shows up. And NOW, I just found a trailer for a movie called Stealth, starring Jamie Foxx that features — you guessed it — an intelligent stealth bomber that gets shocked by lightning (number-5 alive!) and turns EVIL and must be stopped. I feel like I’m on some kind of bizarre carousel this week.

[ Incidentally, anyone remember my little article about artists being prescient? Well, there ya go. ]

Uh. Seriously. They took neurons from a rat brain, suspended it in some crazy liquid and hooked it up and got it flying an F-22 simulation. Bizarre. The odd thing is that I recently completed reading Jeff Hawkins’ “On Intelligence” where he points out that neural network (or connectivist) approaches to machine intelligence haven’t come too far in too long. I guess there’s no accounting for the time lag in paper publishing.

[ I originally found this story here at Australasian Ufologist. ]

[Amazon link: "On Intelligence"] I have to say first that I bought this book with a great deal of skepticism. I found it highly unlikely that a product designer would have anything other than hyperbole and over-generalizations (i.e. Malcolm Gladwell, the “Tipping Point” or “Blink”) regarding something as complex as machine intelligence or the human brain. Boy was I wrong. After reading Hawkin’s introduction and discovering that he was and is far more than a product designer I began to relax my initial resistance to the book. Read more…