Hawkins on machine intelligence

I went to see Palm and Treo creator Jeff Hawkins speak today at RPI. Hawkins is both smart and humble and would be worth listening to just to hear him talk about starting a company. (In fact, check out this terrific 2002 entrepreneurship lecture he gave at Stanford).

Today, he talked about his idea of Hierarchical Temporal Memory, which he spelled out in the 2004 book On Intelligence. A thumbnail description of HTM is that human intelligence is built around the neocortex’s ability to recognize patterns and make predictions about them, which he argues is an algorithm that can be used to create intelligent machines. For more on what smarter machines — or computers — would mean in business, see my Big Think post Making Computers Smarter
.