On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain Will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines.

ON INTELLIGENCE: How a New Understanding of the Brain Will Lead to the Creation of truly Intelligent Machines JEFF HAWKINS WITH SANDRA BLAKESLEE

According to computer expert Hawkins, scientists studying artificial intelligence are misdirected. Hawkins asserts that these researchers are largely trying to program computers to act like people without first understanding "what intelligence is and what it means to understand." Hawkins is the founder of Palm computing and the architect of devices such as the Palm Pilot. In this book with New York Times science writer Blakeslee, Hawkins turns to his second passion: a quest to understand how the brain thinks and how to transfer that capability to machines. In 2002, he established the Redwood Neuroscience Institute and dedicated it to brain theories. Hawkins and his colleagues not only study the biology of the brain but also consider intelligence as a computational operation. The authors address how the brain uses memory to continually make predictions about the future. This "memory-prediction framework," the crux of intelligence, is centered in the brain's neocortex, the authors contend. There, vision, hearing, touch, language, and memory together sort out the world for each individual With this background, the authors look to the future of truly intelligent machines. Times, 2004, 261 p., b&w illus., hardcover, $25.00.