In the foreword, the legendary evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins says the book “will turn your mind into a maelstrom of … provocative ideas.” I agree. It’s filled with fascinating insights into the architecture of the brain and tantalizing clues about the future of intelligent machines. Hawkins argues that we can’t achieve artificial general intelligence “by doing more of what we are currently doing.” In his view, understanding much more about the part of the brain called the neocortex is key to developing true general AI, and that’s what this book is about.Ī Thousand Brains is appropriate for non-experts who have little background in brain science or computer science. Nothing we call AI today has anything like that kind of intelligence.Īs Hawkins puts it, “There is no ‘I’ in AI.” Computers can beat a grandmaster in chess, but they don’t know that chess is a game. I believe that in the coming decades we will produce machines that have the kind of broad, flexible “general intelligence” that would enable them to help us address truly complex, multifaceted challenges like improving medicine through a more advanced understanding of how proteins fold. His platform for doing that is a Silicon Valley–based company called Numenta, which he founded in 2005. After his tech career, he decided to work with a singular focus on just one problem: making big improvements in machine learning. I got to know Hawkins in the 1990s, when he was one of the pioneers of mobile computing and co-inventor of the PalmPilot. It’s called A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence, by a tech entrepreneur named Jeff Hawkins. Recently, I picked up a brain book that’s much more theoretical. Over the years, I’ve read quite a few books about the brain, most of them written by academic neuroscientists who view it through the lens of sophisticated lab experiments. Watching helplessly as my dad declined from Alzheimer’s made me feel as if this era is not yet a golden era. So you can imagine how far we are from getting answers to the really big, important questions about brain function, including what causes neurodegeneration and how we can block it. We’re only beginning to understand how a worm’s brain works-and it has only 300 neurons, compared with our 86 billion. As a result, many people call this the golden era of neuroscience.īut let’s put this progress in context.
For example, we now understand more about the different types of neurons that make up the brain, how neurons communicate with one another, and which neurons are active when we’re performing all kinds of tasks. Thanks to better instruments for observing brain activity, faster genetic sequencing, and other technological improvements, we’ve learned a lot in recent years. Of all the subjects I’ve been learning about lately, one stands out for its mind-boggling complexity: understanding how the cells and connections in our brains give rise to consciousness and our ability to learn.