'Jeff Hawkins Q&A'

interview w/ Jeff Hawkins here

 

Jeff Hawkins, the chief technology officer of Palm, was the founder of Palm Computing, where he invented the PalmPilot, and also the founder of HandSpring, where he invented the Treo. But Palm and creating mobile devices are only a part-time job for Hawkins. His true passion is neuroscience. Now, after many years of research and meditation, he has proposed an all-encompassing theory of the mammalian neocortex. "Hierarchical Temporal Memory" (HTM) claims to explain how our brains discover, infer, and predict patterns in the phenomenal world.

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JP: Why would Numenta want to build an HTM? After all, there are already billions and billions of human HTMs. We can make billions more from sexual intercourse.

JH: [Laughs.] Well, we wouldn't use artificial HTMs to do things that humans can already do. But an artificial HTM could do things that humans can't. We could use them to recognize patterns using exotic sensors. Maybe I could use weather sensors all around the world, and if I fed them into an HTM, it would perceive the weather like you and I perceive that building. HTMs could think in the higher mathematical dimensions or they could see how proteins fold. You could create an entire sensory world of things that humans just have problems seeing and predicting because we just didn't evolve in the right time-frames or scales. People say, "Jeff you shouldn't talk about stuff, because people will think you're crazy," but I say, I think this stuff is really going to happen.