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A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence

Jeff Hawkins, Richard Dawkins · 4 HN comments
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Amazon Summary
A bestselling author, neuroscientist, and computer engineer unveils a theory of intelligence that will revolutionize our understanding of the brain and the future of AI. For all of neuroscience's advances, we've made little progress on its biggest question: How do simple cells in the brain create intelligence? Jeff Hawkins and his team discovered that the brain uses maplike structures to build a model of the world-not just one model, but hundreds of thousands of models of everything we know. This discovery allows Hawkins to answer important questions about how we perceive the world, why we have a sense of self, and the origin of high-level thought. A Thousand Brains heralds a revolution in the understanding of intelligence. It is a big-think book, in every sense of the word.
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Tangentially related book recommendation:

Jeff Hawkins, A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence. It describes the importance of reference frames for intelligence, for locating limbs relative to the body, locating the body in space, locating objects in space (even abstract objects in abstract spaces), and a possible "implementation" of that in the columns of the neocortex (by, basically, if I understood correctly, positing certain neurons that encode location, eg via intersection of coordinates, and certain neurons that encode features, and then learning a connection between those).

A short and interesting read (with quite some implications for progress in AI).

Podcast with Sam Harris: https://samharris.org/podcasts/255-future-intelligence/

Jeff Hawkins at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Hawkins

The tech developed by his AI company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_temporal_memory

Book at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Thousand-Brains-New-Theory-Intelligen...

ETA: Oh, quite some previous discussion on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20326396

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19311279

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26240901

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26794286

An interesting theory as to why spatiality helps so much is outlined in Jeff Hawkins' "1000 brain theory" (https://www.amazon.com/Thousand-Brains-New-Theory-Intelligen...). His team's research hints that all neocortical processing happens with reference frames at the core.
Title needs (2019).

A new book by Jeff Hawkins is coming out [0].

[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1541675819

azernik
You know it's an exciting field when something 1.5-2 years old needs a date on it.
VladimirGolovin
Interesting. One of the blurbs got my attention:

"Brilliant....It works the brain in a way that is nothing short of exhilarating." ― Richard Dawkins.

cjauvin
His previous book (On Intelligence) is very stimulating and contains many ideas that have interesting connections with Deep Learning. I'm looking forward to read this new one.
KingFelix
Second that, his first book was pretty great and easy to digest.
mrec
IIRC it also had an appendix entitled "Testable Predictions", which as a philosophy graduate came as a breath of fresh air.
Hawkins also has a new book coming. His first book (as said in other comments) is a fantastic read.

https://www.amazon.com/Thousand-Brains-New-Theory-Intelligen...

y-c-o-m-b
Thanks for posting this, I've just pre-ordered it. I didn't know he was coming out with a new one until I saw your post. I really liked reading On Intelligence.
ssivark
For those interested, the book probably expands on the following paper from a few months ago: https://numenta.com/blog/2019/01/16/the-thousand-brains-theo... (paper linked to from blog post)

There's also a recent Lex Fridman podcast episode where he interviews Jeff Hawkins on this theme: https://lexfridman.com/jeff-hawkins/

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