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

by Jeff Hawkins

Prediction is not just one of the things your brain does. It is the primary function of the neocortex, and the foundation of intelligence. The cortex is an organ of prediction. If we want to understand what intelligence is, what creativity is, how your brain works, and how to build intelligent machines, we must understand the nature of these predictions and how the cortex makes them.

Even behavior is best understood as a by-product of prediction.

All future prediction nodes are part of a single multi-branched hierarchy.

It is natural to imagine that our mind will continue after the death of our body, but when the brain dies so does the mind. The truth of this is evident if our brains fail before our bodies. People with Alzheimer’s disease or with serious brain damage lose their minds even if their bodies stay healthy.

Also, as the author points out, the mind is a memory prediction faculty. This would be useless to a person who could no longer affect change, as those who are dead and living in an unchanging heaven would be.

Moral reasoning is learned. Stereotypes in mortality. Skepticism is the basis of science?

brain—things like fear, paranoia, and desire. But intelligent machines will not have these faculties. They will not have personal ambition. They will not desire wealth, social

Desire is listed among disorders, but desire is any motiviation. Surely the machines will have directives and those directives will involve interests. It's time, now that we are strugling to understand how to create artificial intelligences, that we stop making open war on human intelligences, which, as the author theorizes, is nothing more than future prediction with the intent of beneficial outcome for a self-interested entity.

They will not have appetites, addictions, or mood disorders. Intelligent machines will not have anything resembling human emotion

What a venal view of human emotions. This derives from the "fallen man", east of eden, sinful nature, gargoyle view of mankind. Also, it makes it sound like the totalitarian deca-megadeath hemoclysm of the 20th century that he was guarding against was merely an emotional outburst or inexplicable mood disorder of some "bad actors", rather than the inevitable outcome of the philosophical assumptions about war and governance that dominated in the European nations at that time. This is not a small or trivial point to get wrong in a discussion about designing autonomous, self-acting, intelligences.