A Personal History
The first chapter is a brief history of Hawkins' interest in neuroscience juxtaposed against a history of artificial intelligence research. Hawkins uses a story of his failed application to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to illustrate a conflict of ideas. Hawkins believed (and ostensibly continues to believe) creating true artificial intelligence will only be possible with intellectual progress in the discipline of neuroscience. Hawkins writes that the scientific establishment (as symbolized by MIT) has historically rejected the relevance of neuroscience to artificial intelligence. Indeed, some artificial intelligence researchers have " pride in ignoring neurobiology" (p. 12).
Hawkins is an electrical engineer by training, and a neuroscientist by inclination. He used electrical engineering concepts as well as the studies of neuroscience to formulate his framework. In particular, Hawkins treats the propagation of nerve impulses in our nervous system as an encoding problem, specifically, a future predicting state machine, similar in principle to feed-forward error-correcting state machines.
Read more about this topic: On Intelligence
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