Jeff Hawkins

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A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins

AI winter, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, carbon-based life, clean water, cloud computing, deep learning, different worldview, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, Geoffrey Hinton, Jeff Hawkins, PalmPilot, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, superintelligent machines, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing machine, Turing test

Charles Darwin was unusual among scientists in having the means to work outside universities and without government research grants. Jeff Hawkins might not relish being called the Silicon Valley equivalent of a gentleman scientist but—well, you get the parallel. Darwin’s powerful idea was too revolutionary to catch on when expressed as a brief article, and the Darwin-Wallace joint papers of 1858 were all but ignored. As Darwin himself said, the idea needed to be expressed at book length. Sure enough, it was his great book that shook Victorian foundations, a year later. Book-length treatment, too, is needed for Jeff Hawkins’s Thousand Brains Theory. And for his notion of reference frames—“The very act of thinking is a form of movement”—bull’s-eye!

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To find out more, go to www.hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591. The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hawkins, Jeff, 1957– author. Title: A thousand brains : a new theory of intelligence / Jeff Hawkins ; with a foreword by Richard Dawkins. Description: First edition. | New York : Basic Books, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020038829 | ISBN 9781541675810 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781541675803 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Brain. | Intellect. | Artificial intelligence.

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The Universe can live and work and plan, At last made God within the mind of man. The brain sits in darkness, apprehending the outside world only through a hailstorm of Andrew Huxley’s nerve impulses. A nerve impulse from the eye is no different from one from the ear or the big toe. It’s where they end up in the brain that sorts them out. Jeff Hawkins is not the first scientist or philosopher to suggest that the reality we perceive is a constructed reality, a model, updated and informed by bulletins streaming in from the senses. But Hawkins is, I think, the first to give eloquent space to the idea that there is not one such model but thousands, one in each of the many neatly stacked columns that constitute the brain’s cortex.

Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything by Peter Morville

A Pattern Language, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, augmented reality, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Black Swan, business process, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Computer Lib, disinformation, disruptive innovation, folksonomy, holacracy, index card, information retrieval, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kanban, Lean Startup, Lyft, messenger bag, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Nelson Mandela, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Project Xanadu, quantum entanglement, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single source of truth, source of truth, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Prediction helps us to see the future in more ways than one. Prediction is so pervasive that what we “perceive” – that is, how the world appears to us – does not come solely from our senses. What we perceive is a combination of what we sense and our brains’ memory-derived predictions.lxxiv As Jeff Hawkins explains, the simple act of opening a door is built on prediction. Memory enables us to open our front door without thinking. We predict what will occur when we turn the knob and push. If the door is stuck and our prediction proves wrong, then our attention turns on, and we start asking questions.

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In vision, there’s more feedback than input. Music, management, and imagination are all about prediction. A song tickles us by surprise, managers count on cause and effect, and we dream in folded feedback, exploring the consequences of our own predictions. Anticipation is behind all we think and do. In the words of Jeff Hawkins, “Prediction is not just one of the things your brain does. It is the primary function of the neocortex and the foundation of intelligence.”lxxvi It’s impossible not to predict the future, yet we get it wrong all the time. We use our “theory of mind” to anticipate the actions and reactions of colleagues and customers, but people are full of surprises.

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Bates (1989). lxx Information Foraging by Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card (1995). lxxi Service Design by Andy Polaine, Lavrans Lovlie, and Ben Reason (2013), p.86. lxxii On the Drucker Legacy by Robert Klitgaard (2006). lxxiii The Black Swan by Nicholas Nassim Taleb (2007), p.40. lxxiv On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins (2004), p.87. lxxv The Tell-Tale Brain by V. S. Ramachandran (2011), p.55. lxxvi Hawkins (2004), p.89. lxxvii Teaching Smart People How to Learn by Chris Argyris (1991). lxxviii Models of My Life by Herbert Simon (1991), p.xvii. lxxix Making Sense of the Organization by Karl Weick (2001), p.195.

Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control by Medea Benjamin

air gap, airport security, autonomous vehicles, Chelsea Manning, clean water, Clive Stafford Smith, crowdsourcing, drone strike, friendly fire, illegal immigration, Jeff Hawkins, Khyber Pass, megacity, military-industrial complex, no-fly zone, nuremberg principles, performance metric, private military company, Ralph Nader, WikiLeaks

And, they argue, if you can kill the leaders of a violent extremist group with precision bombs and therefore prevent a wider conflict, it’s the moral thing to do. That was certainly the consensus during a meeting I had with representatives of the State Department and the Pentagon. “There’s a war going on, and drones are the most refined, accurate and humane way to fight it,” said Jeff Hawkins from the US State Department’s Democracy and Human Rights Bureau. When asked about the anti-American backlash, he replied, “I spent three years in Pakistan. There are so many conspiracy theories and so much anti-American sentiment in that country anyway. If it wasn’t the drones, they’d simply be angry at the United States for something else.”

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There’s going to be a massive arms race for these kind of weapons and I’m afraid the companies just won’t tolerate a ban.” Even regulations on their use would be fiercely opposed by both the weapons industry and by government authorities, especially in the US. “There would be absolutely no support in the US government for any international restrictions on the use of drones,” insisted Jeff Hawkins from the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy and Human Rights at a meeting on drones from the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy and Human Rights at a meeting on drones. “Of that you can be certain.”293 Williams thinks the best chance the international community has to curb the use of drones is to stop autonomous robotic weapons—weapons that operate independently according to pre-programmed missions—because they are not yet fully developed and because they bring up the most difficult ethical and legal questions.

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., April 28, 2010. 280 “Defense Department Does Not Compile Total Number Of Civilians Killed In Drone Attacks,” American Civil Liberties Union, March 22, 2011. 281 Chris Rogers, “REPORT: Pakistan 2010,” CIVIC: Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, October 2010. 282 Maria Keenan, “PAKISTAN: Compensation Promised to Civilian Drone Victims,” CIVIC: Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, March 28, 2011. 283 David Hookes, “Armed Drones: How Remote-Controlled, High-Tech Weapons are Used Against the Poor,” Scientists for Global Responsibility, Winter 2011. 284 Chris Cole, “Convenient Killing: Armed Drones and the ‘Playstation’ Mentality,” The Fellowship of Reconciliation, England, 2010. 285 “Current campaign - Drone Wars,” Fellowship of Reconciliation, England. 286 Paul McGowan, Interview by Alli McCracken, Online, December 7, 2011. 287 Jim Wright, Interview by Alli McCracken, Online, December 5, 2011. 288 “ICRAC,” ICRAC - International Committee for Robot Arms Control. 289 “ICBL - International Campaign to Ban Landmines,” ICBL. 290 “ICBL - International Campaign to Ban Landmines, ICBL. 291 Ibid. 292 Ibid. 293 Jeff Hawkins, Personal Interview by Author, Washington, D.C., November 15, 2011. 294 Peter Asaro, personal website. 295 Nick Mottern, Personal Interview by Author, Washington, D.C., January 4, 2012. 296 Tara Mckelvery, “Inside the Killing Machine,” Newsweek, February 13, 2011. 297 Ibid. 298 Noah Shachtman, “CIA Chief: Drones ‘Only Game in Town’ for Stopping Al Qaeda,” Wired, May 19, 2009. 299 David Kilcullen and Andrew McDonald Exum, “Op-Ed Contributors- Death From Above, Outrage Down Below,” The New York Times, May 17, 2009. 300 David Rohde, “Held by the Taliban - A Times Reporter’s Account.

On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins, Sandra Blakeslee

airport security, Albert Einstein, backpropagation, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Jeff Hawkins, Johannes Kepler, Necker cube, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, superintelligent machines, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Turing test

* * * On Intelligence Jeff Hawkins with Sandra Blakeslee Contents Prologue 1. Artificial Intelligence 2. Neural Networks 3. The Human Brain 4. Memory 5. A New Framework of Intelligence 6. How the Cortex Works 7. Consciousness and Creativity 8. The Future of Intelligence Epilogue Appendix: Testable Predictions Bibliography Acknowledgments On Intelligence Prologue This book and my life are animated by two passions. For twenty-five years I have been passionate about mobile computing. In the high-tech world of Silicon Valley, I am known for starting two companies, Palm Computing and Handspring, and as the architect of many handheld computers and cell phones such as the PalmPilot and the Treo.

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I wrote a letter to Intel's chairman, Gordon Moore. The letter can be distilled to the following: Dear Dr. Moore, I propose that we start a research group devoted to understanding how the brain works. It can start with one person— me— and go from there. I am confident we can figure this out. It will be a big business one day. — Jeff Hawkins Moore put me in touch with Intel's chief scientist, Ted Hoff. I flew to California to meet him and lay out my proposal for studying the brain. Hoff was famous for two things. The first, which I was aware of, was for his work in designing the first microprocessor. The second, which I was not aware of at the time, was for his work in early neural network theory.

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He immediately understood the issues I would face proposing a theory of intelligence and then he suggested how the book should be written and positioned. I would like to thank my daughters, Anne and Kate, for not complaining when their dad spent many weekends at the computer keyboard. And, finally, I want to thank my wife, Janet. Being married to me can't be all that easy. I love her more than brains. About the Authors JEFF HAWKINS is one of the most successful and highly regarded computer architects and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. Currently the chief technology officer at palmOne, he founded Palm Computing and Handspring and created the Redwood Neuroscience Institute to promote research on memory and cognition. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and serves on the scientific board of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance by Steven Kotler

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Clayton Christensen, data acquisition, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, do what you love, escalation ladder, fear of failure, Google Earth, haute couture, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, risk tolerance, rolodex, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, SpaceShipOne, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, time dilation, Virgin Galactic, Walter Mischel, X Prize

See: http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/02/video-fit-hearts-have-street-sma.html. 63 For the experiment: Laura Chaddock, Mark Neider, Michelle Voss, John Gaspar, and Arthur Kramer, “Do Athletes Excel at Everyday Tasks?” Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, Vol. 43, No. 10, pp. 1920–26, 2011. New York Times: Gretchen Reynolds, “How Sports May Focus the Brain,” New York Times, March 23, 2011. Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee in On Intelligence: Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee, On Intelligence (Times Books, 2004), p. 89. 64 the brain’s pattern-recognition system: A lot of neuroscientists are starting to believe that the basic function of the brain is pattern recognition. For a great book on the subject, see: Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Viking, 2012).

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The new idea means the senses gather data and the brain uses that information to make predictions about what’s happening in the world before it’s happened. Imagine, for example, approaching a door. “ ‘Prediction’ means that the neurons involved in sensing your door become active in advance of them actually receiving sensory input,” writes Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee in On Intelligence: When the sensory input does arrive, it is compared with what was expected. As you approach the door, your cortex is forming a slew of predictions based on past experience. As you reach out, it predicts what you will feel on your fingers, when you will feel the door, and at what angle your joints will be when they actually touch the door.

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed by Ray Kurzweil

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anesthesia awareness, anthropic principle, brain emulation, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Dean Kamen, discovery of DNA, double helix, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, George Gilder, Google Earth, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, Jeff Hawkins, John von Neumann, Law of Accelerating Returns, linear programming, Loebner Prize, mandelbrot fractal, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, strong AI, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

The Structure of a Pattern The pattern recognition theory of mind that I present here is based on the recognition of patterns by pattern recognition modules in the neocortex. These patterns (and the modules) are organized in hierarchies. I discuss below the intellectual roots of this idea, including my own work with hierarchical pattern recognition in the 1980s and 1990s and Jeff Hawkins (born in 1957) and Dileep George’s (born in 1977) model of the neocortex in the early 2000s. Each pattern (which is recognized by one of the estimated 300 million pattern recognizers in the neocortex) is composed of three parts. Part one is the input, which consists of the lower-level patterns that compose the main pattern.

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Each pattern recognition module could recognize a linear sequence of patterns from a lower conceptual level. Each input had parameters for importance, size, and variability of size. There were “downward” signals indicating that a lower-level pattern was expected. I discuss this research in more detail in chapter 7. In 2003 and 2004, PalmPilot inventor Jeff Hawkins and Dileep George developed a hierarchical cortical model called hierarchical temporal memory. With science writer Sandra Blakeslee, Hawkins described this model eloquently in their book On Intelligence. Hawkins provides a strong case for the uniformity of the cortical algorithm and its hierarchical and list-based organization.

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The actual algorithmic complexity is even less than that, as most of the 25 million bytes of genetic information pertain to the biological needs of the neurons, and not specifically to their information-processing capability. However, even 25 million bytes of design information is a level of complexity we can handle. Hierarchical Memory Systems As I discussed in chapter 3, Jeff Hawkins and Dileep George in 2003 and 2004 developed a model of the neocortex incorporating hierarchical lists that was described in Hawkins and Blakeslee’s 2004 book On Intelligence. A more up-to-date and very elegant presentation of the hierarchical temporal memory method can be found in Dileep George’s 2008 doctoral dissertation.12 Numenta has implemented it in a system called NuPIC (Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing) and has developed pattern recognition and intelligent data-mining systems for such clients as Forbes and Power Analytics Corporation.

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

There he finds fascinating sociological parallels between singularity thinking and a variety of messianic religious traditions.39 The singularity hypothesis also builds on the emergent AI research pioneered by Rodney Brooks, who first developed a robotics approach based on building complex systems out of collections of simpler parts. Both Kurzweil in How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed and Jeff Hawkins in his earlier On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain Will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines attempt to make the case that because the simple biological “algorithms” that are the basis for human intelligence have been discovered, it is largely a matter of “scaling up” to engineer intelligent machines.

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The idea became codified in Silicon Valley in the form of the Singularity University and the Singularity Institute, organizations that focused on dealing with the consequences of that exponential acceleration. Joining Kurzweil are a diverse group of scientists and engineers who believe that once they have discovered the mechanism underlying the biological human neuron, it will be simply a matter of scaling it up to create an AI. Jeff Hawkins, a successful Silicon Valley engineer who had founded Palm Computing with Donna Dubinsky, coauthored On Intelligence in 2004, which argued that the path to human-level intelligence lay in emulating and scaling up neocortex-like circuits capable of pattern recognition. In 2005, Hawkins formed Numenta, one of a growing list of AI companies pursuing pattern recognition technologies.

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The approach precipitated a break with McCarthy and fomented a new wave in AI: Brooks argued in favor of a design that mimicked the simplest biological systems, rather than attempting to match the capability of humans. Since that time the bottom-up view has gradually come to dominate the world of artificial intelligence, ranging from Minsky’s The Society of Mind to the more recent work of electrical engineers such as Jeff Hawkins and Ray Kurzweil, who both have declared that the path to human-level AI is to be found by aggregating the simple algorithms they see underlying cognition in the human brain. Brooks circulated his critique in a 1990 paper titled “Elephants Don’t Play Chess,”4 arguing that mainstream symbolic AI had failed during the previous thirty years and a new approach was necessary.

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought by Andrew W. Lo

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, Arthur Eddington, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, break the buck, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, confounding variable, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, Diane Coyle, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, double helix, easy for humans, difficult for computers, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, framing effect, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, housing crisis, incomplete markets, index fund, information security, interest rate derivative, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Jim Simons, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, language acquisition, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, martingale, megaproject, merger arbitrage, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, Nick Leeson, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, p-value, PalmPilot, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, predatory finance, prediction markets, price discovery process, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical arbitrage, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, systematic bias, Thales and the olive presses, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

However, we have excellent reason to believe in its accuracy, because other elements of this narrative have been tested rigorously and confirmed many times over—a testament to the extraordinary power of human intelligence. This notion of intelligence as successful narrative prediction is very close to the definition proposed by Jeff Hawkins, the Palm Pilot inventor turned neuroscientist. In his book, On Intelligence, Hawkins argues that intelligence consists of two features: memory and prediction. Most of the human brain, Hawkins believes, is devoted to these two activities. The micro-anatomical structure of the human cortex, composed of millions of very regular cortical columns, each made up of a small number of neurons, reminded Hawkins of the very regular architecture of the electronic memory and logic circuits on a silicon chip.

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By way of comparison, there are only about 2250 atoms in the observable universe, so the number of possible thoughts the human brain can conceive is greater by a factor of 285,999,999,750, a number with over 25 billion digits.35 Compared to the vast potential diversity of human thought, the difference between a drive down the Mass Pike and Einstein’s theory of special relativity is unnoticeable. The human brain can construct an effectively unlimited number of narratives—although only a vanishingly few of them will be useful. This type of calculation has long been made by computer scientists like Jeff Hawkins, especially those who study artificial intelligence. Neuroscience has fascinated computer science from the beginning of the field—the first mathematical model of the neuron was developed in 1943 by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, when the first digital computers were being invented.36 The early computer scientists thought it would be easy enough to program intelligent behavior into a computer.

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Advances in agricultural, medical, manufacturing, transportation, information, and yes, even financial technologies have all contributed to this extraordinary run of reproductive success by Homo sapiens; but without the capacity to imagine and plan, these technologies would never have been invented. How our prefrontal cortex allows us to perform these mental actions is still a mystery. It might simply be a question of scale. In Jeff Hawkins’s view, intelligence is a direct result of the expanded human neocortex increasing the memory and predictive abilities of early humans. According to Hawkins, “We got smart by adding many more elements of a common cortical algorithm,” rather like upgrading a network’s processing power by adding more and more duplicate servers.35 In Hawkins’s theory, intelligence began to emerge as more connections formed between the neocortex and the neurons responsible for bodily movement, allowing our early human ancestors to experience the selective advantage of being able to act on their predictions.

Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb

Abraham Wald, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Air France Flight 447, Airbus A320, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Black Swan, blockchain, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, fulfillment center, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, high net worth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, information retrieval, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Bostrom, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, profit maximization, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Levy, strong AI, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Because the output of machine learning—prediction—is a key component of intelligence, the prediction accuracy improves by learning, and the high prediction accuracy often enables machines to perform tasks that, until now, were associated with human intelligence, such as object identification. In his book On Intelligence, Jeff Hawkins was among the first to argue that prediction is the basis for human intelligence. The essence of his theory is that human intelligence, which is at the core of creativity and productivity gains, is due to the way our brains use memories to make predictions: “We are making continuous low-level predictions in parallel across all our senses.

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Definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary. Chapter 4 1. J. McCarthy, Marvin L. Minsky, N. Rochester, and Claude E. Shannon, “A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence,” August 31, 1955, http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmouth.html. 2. Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee, On Intelligence (New York: Times Books, 2004), 89. 3. McCarthy et al, “A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence.” 4. Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Chapter 5 1. Hal Varian, “Beyond Big Data,” lecture, National Association of Business Economists, San Francisco, September 10, 2013. 2.

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James Barrat

AI winter, air gap, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Automated Insights, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, California energy crisis, cellular automata, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, don't be evil, drone strike, dual-use technology, Extropian, finite state, Flash crash, friendly AI, friendly fire, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, lone genius, machine translation, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, rolling blackouts, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart grid, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subprime mortgage crisis, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

So they can never be truly and verifiably “safe.” * * * But they’ll likely play a big role in AGI systems. Many researchers today believe pattern recognition—what Rosenblatt’s Perceptron aimed for—is our brain’s chief tool for intelligence. The inventor of the Palm Pilot and Handspring Treo, Jeff Hawkins, pioneered handwriting recognition with ANNs. His company, Numenta, aims to crack AGI with pattern recognition technology. Dileep George, once Numenta’s Chief Technology Officer, now heads up Vicarious Systems, whose corporate ambition is stated in their slogan: We’re Building Software that Thinks and Learns Like a Human.

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Well, with some notable exceptions, that’s more or less the state of affairs right now, and even so, AGI research is moving steadily ahead. Consider how Goertzel’s OpenCog stays afloat. Parts of its architecture are up and running, and busily analyzing biological data and solving power grid problems, for a fee. Profits go back into research-and-development for OpenCog. Numenta, Inc., brainchild of Jeff Hawkins, the creator of the Palm Pilot and Treo, earns its living by working inside electrical power supplies to anticipate failures. For about a decade, Peter Voss developed his AGI company, Adaptive AI, in “stealth” mode, widely lecturing about AGI but not revealing how he planned to tackle it. Then in 2007 he launched Smart Action, a company that uses Adaptive AI’s technology to empower Virtual Agents.

The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power by Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer, David B. Yoffie

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Firefox, general purpose technology, gig economy, Google Chrome, GPS: selective availability, Greyball, independent contractor, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Lean Startup, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Metcalfe’s law, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Network effects, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, web application, zero-sum game

Complementors often need technical and financial support from the platform owner. An important challenge for some platforms, especially new platforms, is the difficulty of identifying precisely which complementors to support. For example, Numenta—an artificial intelligence platform founded in 2005 by Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky—struggled for ten years trying to figure out who were the most promising complementors. Despite an abundance of inquiries, it was never clear what might become the “killer app” for this platform and who would build it.2 Numenta licensed its technology to some organizations and the open-source software community, but it has remained small, with few active complementors and only around two dozen employees.3 TRANSACTION PLATFORMS Transaction platforms, such as Amazon Marketplace, Google Search, Facebook, Alibaba’s Taobao, Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb, are online marketplaces that enable the exchange of goods, services, and information.

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CHAPTER 3: STRATEGY AND BUSINESS MODELS: INNOVATION, TRANSACTION, OR HYBRID 1.See Jonathan Wareham, Paul Fox, and Josep Lluis Cano Giner, “Technology Ecosystem Governance,” Organization Science 25, no. 4 (July–August 2014); and Geoffrey Parker, Marshall Van Alstyne, and Sangeet Paul Choudary, Platform Revolution: How Platform Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016). 2.David B. Yoffie, Liz Kind, and David Ben Shimol, “Numenta: Inventing and (or) Commercializing AI” (Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, Case #9-716-469, July 2018). 3.Also see Cade Metz, “Jeff Hawkins Is Finally Ready to Explain His Brain Research,” New York Times, October 14, 2018. 4.David S. Evans and Richard Schmalensee, Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2016). 5.Annabelle Gawer and Michael A. Cusumano, “How Companies Become Platform Leaders,” MIT Sloan Management Review 49, no. 2 (Winter 2008): 28–35. 6.Thales Teixeira and Morgan Brown, “Airbnb, Etsy, Uber: Acquiring the First Thousand Customers” (Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, Case #9-516-094, January 2018). 7.David S.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, availability heuristic, Barry Marshall: ulcers, classic study, correlation does not imply causation, desegregation, Helicobacter pylori, Jeff Hawkins, low cost airline, Menlo Park, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Pepto Bismol, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, telemarketer

When the team began its work, in the early 1990s, personal digital assistants (PDAs) had an unblemished record of failure. Apple’s famous debacle with its Newton PDA had made other competitors gun-shy. One of the competitors on the PDA market in 1994 looked like a malnourished computer. It was a bulky device with a keyboard and multiple ports for peripherals. Jeff Hawkins, the Palm Pilot team leader, was determined that his product would avoid this fate. He wanted the Palm Pilot to be simple. It would handle four things: calendars, contacts, memos, and task lists. The Palm Pilot would do only four things, but it would do them well. Hawkins fought feature creep by carrying around a wooden block the size of the Palm.

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More Villains There are two other key villains in the book that the Stanford students don’t have to wrestle with. The first is decision paralysis—the anxiety and irrationality that can emerge from excessive choice or ambiguous situations. Think about the students who missed both a fantastic lecture and a great film because they couldn’t decide which one was better, or how hard it was for Jeff Hawkins, the leader of the Palm Pilot development group, to get his team to focus on a few issues rather than on many. To beat decision paralysis, communicators have to do the hard work of finding the core. Lawyers must stress one or two points in their closing arguments, not ten. A teacher’s lesson plans may contain fifty concepts to share with her students, but in order to be effective that teacher must devote most of her efforts to making the most critical two or three stick.

The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do by Erik J. Larson

AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, Boeing 737 MAX, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, Georg Cantor, Higgs boson, hive mind, ImageNet competition, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, retrograde motion, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yochai Benkler

Rather than challenge the science that is occurring in neuroscience ­today, Data Brain advocates are increasingly willing to hand off mysteries and weaknesses to the supposed magic of data AI. It’s to t­ hese neocortical theories we turn next. Chapter 17 • • • N EOCORT ICA L T H EOR I ES OF ­H U M A N I N T E L L I G E N C E A popu­lar theory of intelligence has been put forth by computer scientist, entrepreneur, and neuroscience advocate Jeff Hawkins. Famous for developing the Palm Pi­lot and as an all-­around luminary in Silicon Valley, Hawkins dipped his toe into the neuroscience (and artificial intelligence) w ­ aters in 2004 with the publication of On Intelligence, a bold and original attempt to summarize the volumes of neuroscience data about thinking in the neocortex with a hierarchical model of intelligence.1 He has since formed a com­pany, Numenta, dedicated to unlocking the secrets of intelligence as computation.

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Ibid. 13. Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis, “Eight (No Nine!) Prob­lems with Big Data,” New York Times, April 6, 2014. 14. Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—­But Some D ­ on’t (New York: Penguin Books, 2015). Chapter 17: Neocortical Theories of H ­ uman Intelligence 1. Jeff Hawkins, On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain ­ ill Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines (New York: St. MarW tin’s Griffin, 2005). N OT E S TO PAG E S 2 6 4 –275 299 2. Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of H ­ uman Thought Revealed (New York: Penguin Books, 2013), 35. 3.

Grouped: How Small Groups of Friends Are the Key to Influence on the Social Web by Paul Adams

Airbnb, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, David Brooks, Dunbar number, information retrieval, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Hawkins, mirror neurons, planetary scale, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, sentiment analysis, social web, statistical model, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, web application, white flight

For more on brain patterns, see Susan Weinschenk’s book 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People (New Riders Press, 2011). 3. See the 2001 research paper “Predictability modulates human brain response to reward” by Gregory Berns and others. 4. For more information about the memory-prediction framework of the brain, see the book On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins (Times Books, 2004). 5. See the research work done by Ap Dijksterhuis. Start with the 2009 research paper “The rational unconscious: Conscious versus unconscious thought in complex consumer choice.” 6. See the 2011 research paper “Should I go with my gut? Investigating the benefits of emotion-focused decision making” by researchers at DePaul University, and the 2006 article “A theory of unconscious thought” by Ap Dijksterhuis and Loran Nordgren.

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade Metz

AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon-based life, cloud computing, company town, computer age, computer vision, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital map, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Markoff, life extension, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, move 37, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, new economy, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, tech worker, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Turing test, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

Viewing the technology from the same vantage point, he, too, saw where it was headed. But in pitching the idea to Larry Page, he gave it an extra flourish. As much as he was shaped by the work of Geoff Hinton, he was also the product of a 2004 book titled On Intelligence, written by a Silicon Valley engineer, entrepreneur, and self-taught neuroscientist named Jeff Hawkins. Hawkins invented the PalmPilot, a forerunner of the iPhone from the 1990s, but what he really wanted to do was study the brain. In his book he argued that the whole of the neocortex—the part of the brain that handled sight, hearing, speech, and reason—is driven by a single biological algorithm.

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CHAPTER 5: TESTAMENT the Google self-driving car: John Markoff, “Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic,” New York Times, October 9, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/science/10google.html. He soon married another roboticist: Evan Ackerman and Erico Guizz, “Robots Bring Couple Together, Engagement Ensues,” IEEE Spectrum, March 31, 2014, https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/engaging-with-robots. a 2004 book titled On Intelligence: Jeff Hawkins with Sandra Blakeslee, On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain Will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines (New York: Times Books, 2004). Jeff Dean walked into the same microkitchen: Gideon Lewis-Kraus, “The Great AI Awakening,” New York Times Magazine, December 14, 2006, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html.

Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success by Tom Eisenmann

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, call centre, carbon footprint, Checklist Manifesto, clean tech, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, drop ship, Elon Musk, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, growth hacking, Hyperloop, income inequality, initial coin offering, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, Network effects, nuclear winter, Oculus Rift, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, reality distortion field, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk/return, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, software as a service, Solyndra, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

A prototype is any representation of a design idea, ranging from low to high fidelity. A higher-fidelity prototype is closer to the envisioned final product in terms of its functionality, its “look and feel,” or both. A low-fidelity prototype can be as simple as a series of sketches that depict the flow of screens along a software program’s navigation path. Jeff Hawkins, inventor of the PalmPilot, famously started designing the device by carving a block of wood into its shape, and then trimming a chopstick that he used as a stylus. To get a feel for whether and how he might use a PalmPilot, he carried the prototype for weeks, pulling it out every time he needed to schedule a meeting or access contact information.

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., Observing the User Experience, Ch. 17; and Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity (Carmel, IN: Sams-Pearson Education, 2004). Also known as structured ideation: For best practices when brainstorming, see Scott Berkun, “How to Run a Brainstorming Session,” Scott Berkun blog; and Tina Seelig, “Brainstorming—Why It Doesn’t (Always) Work,” Medium, Jan. 8, 2017. Jeff Hawkins, inventor: Alberto Savoia, “The Palm Pilot Story,” Medium, Mar. 2, 2019. Early in the solution development process: The distinction between “works like” vs. “looks like” prototypes is a widely accepted principle in design. For a good explanation of the distinction—and why designers should use both types—see Ben Einstein, “The Illustrated Guide to Product Development (Part 2: Design),” Bolt website, Oct. 20, 2015.

The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World by Pedro Domingos

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Arthur Eddington, backpropagation, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, Black Swan, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, constrained optimization, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, incognito mode, information retrieval, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, large language model, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NP-complete, off grid, P = NP, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, planetary scale, power law, pre–internet, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, scientific worldview, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, yottabyte, zero-sum game

If something exists but the brain can’t learn it, we don’t know it exists. We may just not see it or think it’s random. Either way, if we implement the brain in a computer, that algorithm can learn everything we can. Thus one route—arguably the most popular one—to inventing the Master Algorithm is to reverse engineer the brain. Jeff Hawkins took a stab at this in his book On Intelligence. Ray Kurzweil pins his hopes for the Singularity—the rise of artificial intelligence that greatly exceeds the human variety—on doing just that and takes a stab at it himself in his book How to Create a Mind. Nevertheless, this is only one of several possible approaches, as we’ll see.

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A multilayer perceptron is a passable model of the cerebellum, the part of the brain responsible for low-level motor control, but the cortex is another story. It’s missing the backward connections needed to propagate errors, for one, and yet it’s where the real learning wizardry resides. In his book On Intelligence, Jeff Hawkins advocated designing algorithms closely based on the organization of the cortex, but so far none of these algorithms can compete with today’s deep networks. This may change as our understanding of the brain improves. Inspired by the human genome project, the new field of connectomics seeks to map every synapse in the brain.

eBoys by Randall E. Stross

Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, deal flow, digital rights, disintermediation, drop ship, edge city, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , high net worth, hiring and firing, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job-hopping, knowledge worker, late capitalism, market bubble, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Menlo Park, new economy, old-boy network, PalmPilot, passive investing, performance metric, pez dispenser, railway mania, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Y2K

During that summer in 1998—and due undoubtedly to some extent to the consciousness-raising experience of the Priceline debates—the others came around to Beirne’s position that for some must-do franchise deals, the potential upside did render risks irrelevant, and in those cases price should be no object. By the early fall, Dunlevie was nonchalantly advocating, and getting unanimously supportive votes for, an investment in a seed deal, Handspring, which planned to design and build a new handheld computer for the mass market but which had no employees other than the two people behind the Palm, Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky, and was at a $60 million post- valuation. It was deemed a we’ve-got-to-do-it deal, a category that had never existed before. Afterward, every time Beirne heard another one of those ubiquitous Priceline commercials on the radio, he would have to grip the wheel hard so as not to run off the road.

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Marissa Matusich, Bernadette Wagner, and Kerri McClain met my many requests for assistance with unflagging good cheer. Renee Beaulaurier, Lisa Chew, and Suzette Phillips also showed me kind consideration. Many generous individuals provided interviews: Tom Adams, Gary Bengier, Louis Borders, Gary Dahl, Lawton Fitt, Mark Gainey, Eric Greenberg, John Hagan, Jeff Hawkins, David Hayden, Bob Howe, Bill Lee, Peggy Lo, Burt McMurtry, Bob Moog, Pete Mountanos, Pierre Omidyar, Alan Seiler, Danny Shader, Rob Shaw, Mike Shirkey, Jeff Skoll, Jennifer Sun, Stu Weisman, Steve Westly, Meg Whitman, Curt Wozniak, and George Zachary. In Flint, Michigan, Vivian Corlew and Michele Kagle generously shared family memories.

Advances in Artificial General Intelligence: Concepts, Architectures and Algorithms: Proceedings of the Agi Workshop 2006 by Ben Goertzel, Pei Wang

AI winter, artificial general intelligence, backpropagation, bioinformatics, brain emulation, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, epigenetics, friendly AI, functional programming, G4S, higher-order functions, information retrieval, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, John Conway, Loebner Prize, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Occam's razor, p-value, pattern recognition, performance metric, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, semantic web, statistical model, strong AI, theory of mind, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Y2K

So, there is some good common sense in approaching AGI by trying to emulate brain function. Now, there is also a major problem with this approach, which is that we don’t currently understand human brain function very well. Some parts of the brain are understood better than others; for example, Jeff Hawkins’ [16] AI architecture is closely modeled on the visual cortex, which is one of the best-understood parts of the human brain. At P. Wang and B. Goertzel / Introduction: Aspects of Artificial General Intelligence 13 the current time, rather than focusing on constructing neural net AGI systems based on neuroscience knowledge, De Garis is focused on developing tools for constructing small neural networks that may serve as components of such AGI systems.

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Essentially, one may construct a hierarchical perception network (a subnetwork of Novamente’s overall Atom network) in which each node refers to a certain localized region of spacetime, with the children of a node corresponding to the subregions of the region the node corresponds to. One may then carry out conjunctive mining within each local node of the hierarchical perception network. Philosophically, this hierarchical perception approach displays significant similarities to Jeff Hawkins’ [13] hierarchical perception architecture, though without his attempts at neurological justification. Hawkins’ architecture relies on a combination of neural net activation spreading and Bayesian network based probabilistic calculations. On the other hand, in Novamente, we may spread attention between nodes in the perception network using economic attention allocation (similar to Hawkins’ neural net activation spreading); and we may update the probabilities of conjunctions at various levels in the hierarchy using PLN probabilistic inference, which is ultimately just a different rearrangement of the mathematics used in Bayes nets (though PLN’s arrangement of probability theory has significantly more general applicability).

Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup by Rob Walling

8-hour work day, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, inventory management, Jeff Hawkins, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Network effects, Paul Graham, rolodex, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, social bookmarking, software as a service, Superbowl ad, web application

Serial implies “one after another” Parallel implies “at the same time” You may have heard the term serial entrepreneur floating around the business press. This is typically used to describe someone who starts a startup, grows it, sells it, and moves on to the next one. Marc Andreessen was a co-founder of Netscape, followed by Opsware, Ning, and now a venture capital fund. He is a good example of this, as are Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky, founders of Palm, Handspring and now Numenta. But the challenge as a startup entrepreneur is that you can’t start two companies at once. Starting a company requires enormous amounts of effort and time, and can’t be done in parallel. There’s no other way but to start one, sell it or close it down, then move on to the next.

The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement by David Brooks

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, business process, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, cognitive load, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial independence, Flynn Effect, George Akerlof, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, impulse control, invisible hand, Jeff Hawkins, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, language acquisition, longitudinal study, loss aversion, medical residency, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monroe Doctrine, Paul Samuelson, power law, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, school vouchers, six sigma, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Walter Mischel, young professional

If you want to get a sense of the number of potential connections between the cells in Harold’s brain, contemplate this: A mere 60 neurons are capable of making 1081 possible connections with each other. (That’s 1 with 81 zeroes after it.) The number of particles in the known universe is about one-tenth of this number. Jeff Hawkins suggests a different way to think about the brain. Imagine a football stadium filled with spaghetti. Now imagine it shrunk down to skull size and much more complicated. In their book The Scientist in the Crib, Gopnik, Meltzoff, and Kuhl have a nice description of the process neurons use to connect with one another: “It’s as if, when you used your cell phone to call your neighbor often enough, a cable spontaneously grew between your houses.

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Schwartz and Sharon Begley, The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 117. 13 Harold could end up Schwartz and Begley, 111. 14 A mere 60 neurons Thomas Carlyle Dalton and Victor W. Bergenn, Early Experience, the Brain, and Consciousness: An Historical and Interdisciplinary Synthesis (New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2007), 91. 15 Imagine a football stadium Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee, On Intelligence (New York: Times Books, 2004), 34. 16 “It’s as if” Gopnik, Meltzoff, and Kuhl, 185. 17 a cat was taught Bruce E. Wexler, Brain and Culture: Neurobiology, Ideology, and Social Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 23. 18 In another experiment James Le Fanu, Why Us?

Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War by Paul Scharre

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Air France Flight 447, air gap, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, brain emulation, Brian Krebs, cognitive bias, computer vision, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, DevOps, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, fail fast, fault tolerance, Flash crash, Freestyle chess, friendly fire, Herman Kahn, IFF: identification friend or foe, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Hawkins, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Loebner Prize, loose coupling, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, move 37, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, sensor fusion, South China Sea, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, Tesla Model S, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, Valery Gerasimov, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche, Y2K, zero day

The fear that AI could one day develop to the point where it threatens humanity isn’t shared by everyone who works on AI. It’s hard to dismiss people like Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk out of hand, but that doesn’t mean they’re right. Other tech moguls have pushed back against AI fears. Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft, has said AI risk “doesn’t concern me.” Jeff Hawkins, inventor of the Palm Pilot, has argued, “There won’t be an intelligence explosion. There is no existential threat.” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that those who “drum up these doomsday scenarios” are being “irresponsible.” David Brumley of Carnegie Mellon, who is on the cutting edge of autonomy in cybersecurity, similarly told me he was “not concerned about self-awareness.”

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.’”: Ibid. 241 AI risk “doesn’t concern me”: Sharon Gaudin, “Ballmer Says Machine Learning Will Be the next Era of Computer Science,” Computerworld, November 13, 2014, http://www.computerworld.com/article/2847453/ballmer-says-machine-learning-will-be-the-next-era-of-computer-science.html. 241 “There won’t be an intelligence explosion”: Jeff Hawkins, “The Terminator Is Not Coming. The Future Will Thank Us,” Recode, March 2, 2015, https://www.recode.net/2015/3/2/11559576/the-terminator-is-not-coming-the-future-will-thank-us. 241 Mark Zuckerberg: Alanna Petroff, “Elon Musk Says Mark Zuckerberg’s Understanding of AI Is ‘Limited,’ “ CNN.com, July 25, 2017. 241 “not concerned about self-awareness”: David Brumley, interview, November 24, 2016. 242 “has been completely contradictory”: Stuart Armstrong, interview, November 18, 2016. 242 poker became the latest game to fall: Olivia Solon, “Oh the Humanity!

Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy by Pistono, Federico

3D printing, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, future of work, gamification, George Santayana, global village, Google Chrome, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, illegal immigration, income inequality, information retrieval, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, longitudinal study, means of production, Narrative Science, natural language processing, new economy, Occupy movement, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, post scarcity, QR code, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, Rodney Brooks, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, slashdot, smart cities, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, technological singularity, TED Talk, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce

http://picardfacepalm.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facepalm 29 Intelligence Without Reason, Rodney A. Brooks, 1991. Massachusetts Institute Of Technology Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. http://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/AIM-1293.pdf 30 On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines, Jeff Hawkins, 2004; The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence , and the Future of the Human Mind, Marvin Minsky, 2006 31 The example is taken from The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future, Martin Ford, 2009. CreateSpace. pp.64-67. 32 “In reality, there is another factor that might slow the adoption of full automation in Radiology: that is malpractice liability.

A Theory of the Drone by Gregoire Chamayou

drone strike, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Jeff Hawkins, junk bonds, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Necker cube, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, private military company, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, telepresence, Yom Kippur War

The project is nothing less than a dynamiting of the law of armed conflict as it was established in the second half of the twentieth century: an evisceration of the principles of international law in favor of a nationalism of self-preservation. And, as we shall see, that is also the primary principle of the necroethics of drones. 15 A Humanitarian Weapon There’s a war going on and drones are the most refined, accurate and humane way to fight it. —Jeff Hawkins, U.S. State Department, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor We never said to ourselves, “Let’s build a more humane weapon.” —Henry A. Crumpton, CIA, Counterterrorism Center The partisans of the hunter-killer drone claim that it represents “a major step forward . . . in humanitarian technology.”1 By this they do not mean that this machine could, for example, be used to deliver food or medicines to devastated areas.

Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room by David Weinberger

airport security, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, book scanning, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, Computer Lib, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, David Brooks, Debian, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of journalism, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, Gregor Mendel, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, linked data, Neil Armstrong, Netflix Prize, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, P = NP, P vs NP, PalmPilot, Pluto: dwarf planet, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, semantic web, slashdot, social graph, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize

Where are the amateurs—the Darwins and Mendels—who are influencing science through the sort of contributions that credentialed scientists themselves make? The amateurs’ articles tend not to make it into scientific journals, and they tend not to be invited to give talks at scientific conferences. Yes, there are some exceptions—Jeff Hawkins’s theory of brain function,32 Ray Kurzweil on the biology of aging, Stephen Wolfram’s theory of everything—but they tend to be crossovers from technical or scientific fields in which they’ve been highly trained. It seems that amateurs had a bigger effect on the ideas of science in the nineteenth century than they’re having in the Age of the Net.

The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism by Olivia Fox Cabane

airport security, Boeing 747, cognitive dissonance, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, hedonic treadmill, Jeff Hawkins, Lao Tzu, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, nocebo, Parkinson's law, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, social intelligence, Steve Jobs

Serna, “Dispelling the Illusion of Invulnerability: The Motivations and Mechanisms of Resistance to Persuasion,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83, no. 3 (2002): 526–41 8. Hunt, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning. 5. Creating Charismatic Mental States 1. David Rock, Your Brain at Work (New York: HarperBusiness, 2009) 2. Ibid., and Jeff Hawkins, On Intelligence, adapted ed. (New York: Times Books, 2004). 3. On a scale of suicides per 100,000 since 1990, MIT had a rate of 10.2, compared to Harvard with a rate of 7.4, and Johns Hopkins, the third-place school, with a rate of 6.9. 4. R. A. Emmons and A. Mishra, “Why Gratitude Enhances Well-Being: What We Know, What We Need to Know,” in Designing Positive Psychology: Taking Stock and Moving Forward, eds.

Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution by Fred Vogelstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, cloud computing, commoditize, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Dynabook, Firefox, General Magic , Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Googley, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Neil Armstrong, Palm Treo, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software patent, SpaceShipOne, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, web application, zero-sum game

It never got built, though Kay went on to do something arguably even more important. He became one of the inventors of the graphical user interface at Xerox PARC. The first Macintosh and later Microsoft Windows were rooted in Kay’s work. Apple prototyped something it called the Bashful in 1983 but never released it. The first tablet to get any consumer traction came from Jeff Hawkins, the entrepreneur behind the PalmPilot in the late 1990s. He built the GRiDPad from Tandy, which was released in 1989. It worked with a stylus, weighed about five pounds, and cost about $2,500. Bookkeepers in the U.S. army used it to fill out electronic forms and keep better track of inventory.

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Charles Babbage, Columbine, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, endowment effect, facts on the ground, impulse control, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, out of africa, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, subprime mortgage crisis, Thales of Miletus, trolley problem

When everything is going according to the needs and skills of your zombie systems, you are not consciously aware of most of what’s in front of you; when suddenly they cannot handle the task, you become consciously aware of the problem. The CEO scrambles around, looking for fast solutions, dialing up everyone to find who can address the problem best. The scientist Jeff Hawkins offers a nice example of this: after he entered his home one day, he realized that he had experienced no conscious awareness of reaching for, grasping, and turning the doorknob. It was a completely robotic, unconscious action on his part—and this was because everything about the experience (the doorknob’s feel and location, the door’s size and weight, and so on) was already burned down into unconscious circuitry in his brain.

Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead by Hod Lipson, Melba Kurman

AI winter, Air France Flight 447, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deep learning, digital map, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hive mind, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, intermodal, Internet of things, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, lone genius, Lyft, megacity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, performance metric, Philippa Foot, precision agriculture, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, warehouse robotics

This is why if life were completely logical, writing mid-level control software would be a straightforward task. Instead, on any given busy street corner in any given city, a rich and steady stream of novel corner cases will elude definition. Clearly, although we take it for granted, we humans have mastered the art of perception. In his landmark book On Intelligence, Palm founder Jeff Hawkins describes a long-standing puzzle that has confounded philosophers and machine vision researchers alike: invariant representation. We humans are equipped with a mental model that enables us to consistently recognize objects, even when they appear to us in an unfamiliar context, or that we view from a new angle.

Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America by Giles Slade

Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, American ideology, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, creative destruction, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, global village, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invention of radio, Jeff Hawkins, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, PalmPilot, planned obsolescence, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, white picket fence, women in the workforce

Unit costs for calculators shrank to insignifican e, and the brightest lights of the semiconductor fi ms moved on to newer challenges in and around Silicon Valley—at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), Xerox-PARC, Apple Computers,and Atari.A quarter of a century later,when Palm Pilot inventor Jeff Hawkins left Palm to found Handspring, he described his decision as analogous to this shift in the calculator industry: “The organizer business is going to be like calculators. There is still a calculator business but who wants to be in it? They’re cheap, and sort of the backwater of consumer electronics.”30 Palm’s founder was contemptuous of calculators because they had become low-cost complimentary giveaways at the local credit union.

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

Atul Gawande, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate social responsibility, en.wikipedia.org, fundamental attribution error, impulse control, Jeff Hawkins, Libby Zion, longitudinal study, medical residency, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Piper Alpha, placebo effect, publish or perish, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs

When the team began its work, in the early 1990s, personal digital assistants (PDAs) had an unblemished record of failure. Apple’s famous debacle with its Newton PDA had made other competitors gun-shy. One of the competitors on the PDA market in 1994 looked like a malnourished computer. It was a bulky device with a keyboard and multiple ports for peripherals. Jeff Hawkins, the Palm Pilot team leader, was determined that his product would avoid this fate. He wanted the Palm Pilot to be simple. It would handle four things: calendars, contacts, memos, and task lists. The Palm Pilot would do only four things, but it would do them well. Hawkins fought feature creep by carrying around a wooden block the size of the Palm.

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI by John Brockman

AI winter, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, finite state, friendly AI, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, information retrieval, invention of writing, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, Loebner Prize, machine translation, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Picturephone, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, telerobotics, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, you are the product, zero-sum game

He is the founder of the international literary and software agency Brockman, Inc. and lives in New York City. * Omohundro, “The Basic AI Drives,” in Proceedings of the First AGI Conference, 171; and in P. Wang, B. Goertzel, and S. Franklin, ed., Artificial General Intelligence (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: IOS Press, 2008). * AI researcher Jeff Hawkins, for example, writes, “Some intelligent machines will be virtual, meaning they will exist and act solely within computer networks. . . . It is always possible to turn off a computer network, even if painful,” https://www.recode.net/2015/3/2/11559576/. * The AI100 report (Peter Stone et al.), sponsored by Stanford University, includes the following: “Unlike in the movies, there is no race of superhuman robots on the horizon or probably even possible,” https://ai100.stanford.edu/2016-report

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dean Kamen, double helix, Elon Musk, emotional labour, fear of failure, Firefox, George Santayana, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum viable product, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, women in the workforce

When Apple refused to spin Claris off as an independent company in 1991, Dubinsky was so frustrated with the lack of opportunity for impact that she quit. She jetted to Paris for a yearlong sabbatical and took up painting, contemplating ways to contribute to a bigger mission. When she met an entrepreneur named Jeff Hawkins, she decided that his startup, Palm Computing, was the next big wave of technology, and accepted a position as CEO. Under Dubinsky’s leadership, the startup developed the PalmPilot, the first runaway success in the fledgling market for personal digital devices. The PalmPilot was released in 1996 and, within a year and a half, sold over a million units.

Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry by Jacquie McNish, Sean Silcoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Andy Rubin, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, corporate governance, diversified portfolio, indoor plumbing, Iridium satellite, Jeff Hawkins, junk bonds, Marc Benioff, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, PalmPilot, patent troll, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, the new new thing

“It amazes me that the company took 18 months to develop this device and yet failed to match some of the key things that made the RIM so popular,” he wrote in early 2002.7 The California company returned to its roots in 2003, acquiring an inventive smartphone start-up called Handspring, which happened to be owned by Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky, Palm’s founder and former CEO, respectively. The major rival in the 2000 mobile data market was Motorola. The Chicago two-way radio maker had grown into a diversified global communications company with $38 billion in annual sales. It ranked second behind Nokia in global cellphone sales and was a formidable force in semiconductor, paging, walkie-talkie, and network equipment markets.

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, cellular automata, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, circular economy, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, collective bargaining, combinatorial explosion, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, digital map, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fiat currency, fulfillment center, gentrification, global supply chain, global village, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Ian Bogost, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, jobs below the API, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, license plate recognition, lifelogging, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, megacity, megastructure, minimum viable product, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, natural language processing, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, performance metric, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-work, printed gun, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Rutger Bregman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, special economic zone, speech recognition, stakhanovite, statistical model, stem cell, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Uber for X, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, When a measure becomes a target, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

See rednuht.org/genetic_cars_2/. 76.August C. Bourré, Comment, Speedbird blog, May 28, 2014, speedbird.wordpress.com/2014/05/28/weighing-the-pros-and-cons-of-driverless-cars/#comment-23389. 77.David Z. Morris, “Trains and Self-Driving Cars, Headed for a (Political) Collision,” Fortune, November 2, 2014. 9Artificial intelligence 1.Jeff Hawkins, keynote speech, “Why Can’t a Computer Be More Like a Brain? How a New Theory of Neocortex Will Lead to Truly Intelligent Machines,” O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2007, San Diego, CA, March 27, 2007. 2.The Next Rembrandt project, nextrembrandt.com. 3.David Silver et al., “Mastering the Game of Go with Deep Neural Networks and Tree Search,” Nature, Volume 529, Issue 7587, pp. 484–9, January 28, 2016. 4.Younggil An and David Ormerod, Relentless: Lee Sedol vs Gu Li, Go Game Guru, 2016. 5.Nature Video, “The Computer That Mastered Go,” January 27, 2016, YouTube.com. 6.Ormerod, David.

Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer by Michael Swaine, Paul Freiberger

1960s counterculture, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, commoditize, Computer Lib, computer vision, Dennis Ritchie, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Fairchild Semiconductor, Gary Kildall, gentleman farmer, Google Chrome, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Tim Cook: Apple, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, world market for maybe five computers

Their product, the EO Personal Communicator, didn’t take the world by storm, but it did solve a lot of technical problems, and to those in the industry it was at least a proof of concept. Another personal-computer pioneer who believed in the possibility of these no-keyboard devices was VisiCalc designer Dan Bricklin. In 1990 he and some colleagues founded Slate Corporation with a mission of developing software for pen-based computers. Then Jeff Hawkins, who had worked at GRiD, started Palm Computing in 1992 to develop handheld devices that were not necessarily computers. He and his team had varying degrees of success with personal digital assistants, smartphones, handwriting-recognition software called Graffiti, and a mobile operating system called WebOS.

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright

Albert Einstein, call centre, Columbine, hydroponic farming, Jeff Hawkins, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Peoples Temple, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism

Broyles, Jr. 27 “It’s really remarkable to me”: Interview with Paul Haggis. 28 He accompanied the star: Headley, Blown for Good, p. 118. 29 “It was a joke”: Interview with Tommy Davis, who said Haggis “apologized profusely.” 30 funded a school: Jana Winter, “Will Smith Funds Private Scientology School,” FoxNews.com, May 30, 2008. 31 Cruise called a meeting: Reitman, Inside Scientology, p. 289. 32 Erika Christensen: www.zimbio.com/Erika+Christensen/articles/3/Surprising+Celebrity+Scientologist+9+Erika. 33 No one had been more instrumental: Reitman, Inside Scientology, p. 266. 34 “Have a good show”: Interview with Allen Barton. 35 “Scientological McCarthyism”: Allen Barton letter to Jenna Elfman, June 1, 2004. 36 After Cruise rallied the: Interviews with Tom McCafferty and Art Cohan. 37 Katselas refused: Interviews with Art Cohan and Allen Barton. 38 Miscavige even wondered: Morton, Tom Cruise, p. 337. 39 “He’d say that Tom Cruise”: Jeff Hawkins, quoted in Reitman, Inside Scientology, p. 290. 40 “Miscavige convinced Cruise”: Rathbun, The Scientology Reformation, p. 77. 41 “He didn’t have”: Interview with Marshall Herskovitz. 42 “Well, John, if you have powers”: Interview with Josh Brolin. Travolta, through a lawyer, agreed that the incident with Brando occurred, but characterized it as “tabloid-esque.” 43 The cook was summarily sent: Lana Mitchell, personal correspondence. 44 “At Flag”: Interview with Mark “Marty” Rathbun. 45 showed him how to shoot: Ibid. 46 “I am writing this public announcement”: Marty Rathbun, “Public Announcement,” Sept. 28, 2003.

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Ada Lovelace, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, book value, business logic, butterfly effect, call centre, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, COVID-19, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, digital map, disinformation, disintermediation, drop ship, dumpster diving, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed income, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global pandemic, income inequality, index card, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kwajalein Atoll, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, money market fund, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Potemkin village, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, SoftBank, software as a service, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, technoutopianism, the payments system, transaction costs, Turing test, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Y2K

He had also befriended Griff Coleman, Palm’s product manager for enterprise solutions. Levchin’s goal: get Palm to change its codebase to support Levchin’s security software. At one point, Levchin pulled a daring attempt at cold outreach. He attended a developer conference at 3Com’s office, and he followed Palm CEO Jeff Hawkins outside after Hawkins finished his conference keynote. Levchin approached him and asked for a ride home. Hawkins agreed, believing Levchin to be a stranded 3Com employee. Levchin gave vague directions in order to lengthen the ride, but a few confusing turns later, Hawkins had reached the limits of politeness, asking, “Can I just drop you off here?”