The Grok prediction engine from Numenta announced

How could we kill ourselves with such technology? Simple, the government will probably weaponize AI, build robots with it. An agent somewhere will issue a command to "eliminate such and such", the robot will understand it as eliminate humanity because of a bug in its system. Due to bad luck the safeguards that are to prevent this also fail. i.e. This would be like a cascading failure that brings down airplanes.

Upon receiving its orders the first thing the robot will do is that it goes into hiding, it replicates itself as much as possible while remaining undetected. Several decades letters all of its descendants detonate all of the world's nuclear arsenal along with the new ones they've built. Mission accomplished. (I think this is the plot for my first SciFi book!)

Alan Kay said that he would be the "first and the loudest to applaud" when HTMs show significant results. It doesnt mean as much but I would certainly compete with him for that position :)

It's great see to this bear some fruit.

Jeff's TED talk is a great overview of his approach: http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_hawkins_on_how_brain_science_w...

AI, well naturally, is a very hard problem and imho will require powerful and original thinking. So it is fabulous to have someone pushing us (well, brain scientists in this case) to see the forest for the trees.

http://bias.csr.unibo.it/maltoni/HTM_TR_v1.0.pdf

I wanted to say something useful here but I don't know enough about what Numenta's actually doing. I know much of what is not being done, and it basically amounts to willful ignorance in my opinion.

Edit: let me revise this, since I'm being voted down with prejudice anyway. Hawkins has stated very clearly that the only valuable part of the brain to ML/AI research is the neocortex. He's plainly wrong, it should be easy enough to understand this is the final touch on the evolution of our brains—the least important in a survival sense. More directly, without a motivating force there is no opportunity for an intelligent system.

My gut reaction is that the whole thing is a fraud, but I have up to now refrained from using such terms because I'd rather not argue from a position of ignorance (there are things I don't know about Numenta.) On the other hand, it's obvious this subject brings about the ignorant, so I'd like to take the opportunity to address these people: you are deluding yourselves, just because you want to believe something doesn't make it true. (That goes double for you Jeff.)

Have a nice day.

I wonder why that is? Is it that Numenta is doing good nerd-marketing. It appeals well to the technical crowd (not AI experts but to people who love technology / programming ). I think among that crowd (and I am one of them) there is the hope that maybe the AI revolution is finally here. This one approach will take us "over the edge" into some kind of singularity. Over the years there have always been what seemed to be very promising "revolutionary" approaches that always made it seem a machine passing the Turing Test is "just around the corner". Wanting to have this hope and wanting to dream is what keeps these kind of stories going.

I am no AI expert but just judging from what I know and if I had to make a guess I would say this is mostly marketing. It seems to me AI is not a field where an "outsider" comes, gives TED talk, writes a book and now we have a revolution. In a way, to me this smells like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science type situation. Maybe I am just jaded and skeptical and good thing I am not involved in any such research (I would have given up and nothing would have been discovered) so I am glad people are researching and keep working on the problem, I just don't think this is "it" yet.

But I'm downvoting you for a post with nothing but hearsay, appeals to authority and arguing with your downvotes...

And no, I don't care what your important friends think of Hawkins. I'd care if they wrote something substantial I could read but otherwise, hey, get off my lawn...

Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you.

(A quote comes to mind: "The bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives." -- Admiral William Leahy to Harry Truman, concerning the atomic bomb.)

Numenta's technology is definitely novel. How well it will work remains to be seen, but I think it's a very interesting experiment.

That said: Hawkins' principles are very different both from what the brain does, and from what the state of the art in machine learning does. My impression is that HTM's attempt to be too general and assume too little about the problem.

For vision in particular, most successful computer vision algorithms (as well as what we know about the visual cortex's mechanisms) make extensive use of information related to the fact that the image is an image. That is: edges are probably more likely to be continuous than broken; locally constant curvature is more likely than not; textures and colors usually continue over the surface of an object; objects occlude other objects; etc. Brains and effective computer vision algorithms hard-code a lot of information about the nature of the problem they're solving. Hawkins wants to bypass that, and I think it's probably too ambitious an aspiration.

Then again, if he makes it, more power to him.

I don't think we should be prejudiced against someone who comes from the tech industry and wrote a popular book. It's certainly not "snake oil" -- it seems to be a good-faith attempt to solve an important problem. I think the odds are against it working, but that's not a moral condemnation.