A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence

by Jeff Hawkins

deduced

Arrive at a fact with reasoning

consider knowledge and intelligence as more precious than genes and biology and, therefore, worthy of preservation beyond their current home in our biological brain.

progeny

Offspring

If there is no knowledge of something, can we say that the thing exists at all?

Thinking about the universe and the uniqueness of intelligence is one of the reasons I wanted to study the brain.

Solving the brain’s mysteries will lead to true machine intelligence, which will benefit all aspects of society

If we want to understand who we are, then we have to understand how the brain creates intelligence. Reverse engineering the brain and understanding intelligence is, in my opinion, the most important scientific quest humans will ever undertake.

neocortex doesn’t contain one model of the world but about 150,000 sensory-motor modeling systems.

how the neocortex works and how it learns a model of the world.

AI is not intelligent. True intelligence requires machines to learn a model of the world the same way the neocortex does. And I made the case for why machine intelligence is not an existential risk, as many others believe. Machine intelligence will be one of the most beneficial technologies we will ever create.

how the combination of the old brain and false beliefs is a real existential risk, far greater than the presumed threat of AI.

Many of the problems we face—from wars to climate change—are created by false beliefs or the selfish desires of the old brain or both. If every human understood what was going on in their head, I believe we would have fewer conflicts and a sunnier prognosis for our future.

we should be concerned about the future of intelligence and knowledge, independent of our concern about the future of our species.

the human brain is the only thing in the universe that knows the broader universe exists.