Geoff Holden

I just (last night) finished reading On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins with Sandra Blakeslee. It’s a great read, highly recommended to anybody with even the smallest spark of interest in artificial intelligence or intelligent systems. I found the book through an article in IEEE Computer.
The book starts out with the nickel tour of ‘classic AI’, which has led to some good technologies, but nothing that we’d really classify as ‘intelligent’. This leads into the discussion on the real definition of intelligence, which is not just intelligent behaviour. Hawkins puts forth a new framework for intelligence called the memory prediction framework, which describes how the neocortex acts as an auto-associative, hierarchical bank of memories. It boils down to the stipulation that what we know as intelligence is essentially the ability to predict the future based on past events.