Hierarchical Temporal Memory: Jeff Hawkins at the IBM Almaden Lectures

I remember the excitement I felt when I first read Palm Pilot founder Jeff Hawkins' book On Intelligence, over a year ago. It was the same sort of "bingo!" excitement I felt when I first read Marvin Minsky's Society of Mind.

The difference is, that not only is Hawkins very successful in the world of hardware design, he is also working on a credible machine model of his hierarchical temporal memory theory of mind, and is quite close to proving the concept. This lecture transmits some of the enthusiasm that Hawkins feels for his work and its revolutionary possibilities if it should pan out. At the end, you can hear some skeptical neuroscientists expressing their doubts, and watch Hawkins respond.

That is the way science works, after all. Assertion and skepticism. Cycle after cycle of hypotheses being tested and eventually proven or disproven. Everyone with science training should understand that science works this way.

Unfortunately, many scientists with a "politically correct" ideological bias carry this approach of "the one true faith" into their scientific endeavours. They forget that science is not a religion, and make their beliefs in "the blank slate" or "catastrophic anthropogenic global warming" or any number of other political/scientific beliefs, into an orthodoxy that cannot be questioned. That is not science at all.

If you like this lecture, here is an earlier lecture by Hawkins on "How the Cortex Works."