On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain Will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines

by Jeff Hawkins

business of building intelligent machines could evolve along the same lines as the computer industry, with communities of people training intelligent machines to have specialized knowledge and abilities, and selling and swapping the resultant memory configurations.

So long as the inputs to the cortex are nonrandom and have a certain amount of richness or statistical structure, an intelligent system will form invariant memories and predictions about them. There is no reason for these input patterns to be analogous to animal senses, or even to derive from the real world at all. It is in the realm of exotic senses that, I suspect, the revolutionary uses of intelligent machines lie.

Within ten years, I hope, intelligent machines will be one of the hottest areas of technology and science.

Because I have been immersed in the neuroscience and computer fields for over two decades, perhaps my brain has built a high-level model of how technological and scientific change occurs, and that model predicts rapid progress.

commercially. The Intels and Microsofts of a new industry built on hierarchical memories will be started sometime within the next ten years. Undertaking an endeavor on this scale can be financially risky or intellectually demanding, but it is always worth trying.