I have followed the progress of Hawkins and Numenta to an extent. The videos (the Google and sitkack's video) still have the same theme - it's all about prediction and pattern recognition in the simplistic sense.

What missing from this? Off the top of my head:

* Language,

* Goal-oriented interaction with the environment

* General purpose reasoning - things generating novel behaviors based on observations of the environment. Especially, dealing with multiple interacting constrai nts on an ad-hoc basis and deciding which is most important.

And I'm not arguing for human behavior being all rational deduction - pattern recognition and such are a huge part of human behavior but all the ways humans or even animals can change their behavior are where biological intelligence really goes past current versions of computer intelligence. The thing with Jeff's talk is that it may well be that the bulks of raw brain activity is focused on just processing raw streams of data. The truth of this doesn't mean this is the thing that makes the brain seem intelligent in a different fashion from a video camera.