A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence

by Jeff Hawkins

Intelligence is not something that can be programmed in software or specified as a list of rules and facts. We can endow a machine with the ability to learn a model of the world, but the knowledge that makes up that model has to be learned, and learning takes time. As I described in the previous chapter, although we can make intelligent machines that run a million times faster than a biological brain, they cannot acquire new knowledge a million times faster. Acquiring new knowledge and skills takes time regardless of how fast or big a brain might be. In some domains, such as mathematics, an intelligent machine could learn much faster than a human. In most fields, however, the speed of learning is limited by the need to physically interact with the world. Therefore, there can’t be an explosion of intelligence where machines suddenly know much more than we do.