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On Intelligence

Jeff Hawkins
Sandra Blakeslee

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On Intelligence

Release Date: 03 October, 2004
Hardcover
Amazon.com
Jeff Hawkins, the high-tech success story behind PalmPilots and the Redwood Neuroscience Institute, does a lot of thinking about thinking. In On Intelligence Hawkins juxtaposes his two loves--computers and brains--to examine the real future of artificial intelligence. In doing so, he unites two fields of study that have been moving uneasily toward one another for at least two decades. Most people think that computers are getting smarter, and that maybe someday, they'll be as smart as we humans are. But Hawkins explains why the way we build computers today won't take us down that path. He shows, using nicely accessible examples, that our brains are memory-driven systems that use our five senses and our perception of time, space, and consciousness in a way that's totally unlike the relatively simple structures of even the most complex computer chip. Readers who gobbled up Ray Kurzweil's (The Age of Spiritual Machines and Steven Johnson's Mind Wide Open will find more intriguing food for thought here. Hawkins does a good job of outlining current brain research for a general audience, and his enthusiasm for brains is surprisingly contagious. --Therese Littleton

From Publishers Weekly
Hawkins designed the technical innovations that make handheld computers like the Palm Pilot ubiquitous. But he also has a lifelong passion for the mysteries of the brain, and he's convinced that artificial intelligence theorists are misguided in focusing on the limits of computational power rather than on the nature of human thought. He "pops the hood" of the neocortex and carefully articulates a theory of consciousness and intelligence that offers radical options for future researchers. "[T]he ability to make predictions about the future... is the crux of intelligence," he argues. The predictions are based on accumulated memories, and Hawkins suggests that humanoid robotics, the attempt to build robots with humanlike bodies, will create machines that are more expensive and impractical than machines reproducing genuinely human-level processes such as complex-pattern analysis, which can be applied to speech recognition, weather analysis and smart cars. Hawkins presents his ideas, with help from New York Times science writer Blakeslee, in chatty, easy-to-grasp language that still respects the brain's technical complexity. He fully anticipates—even welcomes—the controversy he may provoke within the scientific community and admits that he might be wrong, even as he offers a checklist of potential discoveries that could prove him right. His engaging speculations are sure to win fans of authors like Steven Johnson and Daniel Dennett.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Scientific American
"This book and my life are animated by two passions," writes Hawkins in On Intelligence. Those passions are mobile computing and brains. This curious combination becomes less puzzling when one realizes that Hawkins is a founder not only of two leading mobile computing companies—Palm Computing and Handspring—but also of the Redwood Neuroscience Institute in Menlo Park, Calif., which explores memory and cognition. Hawkins contends that the human brain and intelligence have little in common with today’s computing systems. Therefore, he offers his perspective on artificial intelligence, neural networks, cognition, consciousness and creativity, with the goal of explaining the mind. The book is elegantly written with Blakeslee, a veteran science writer for the New York Times. At its core, the book puts forth Hawkins’s "memory-prediction framework of intelligence"—a model of cognition positing that the main function of the human neocortex, and the basis of intelligence, is to make predictions. The brain constantly compares new sensory information with stored memories and experiences and combines the information to anticipate the future. In essence, as we wander around, we build a reserve of information from which we construct an internal model of the world. But we constantly update that model. When we see a friend wearing a new hat, the brain automatically predicts what that person ought to look like and contrasts that prediction with the new sensory rendering, updating its model. Brain prediction "is so pervasive," Hawkins says, "that what we ‘perceive’... does not come solely from our senses." The continuous interplay of sensory input, memory, prediction and feedback—which occurs instantly through parallel processing in the neocortex—ultimately gives rise to consciousness and intelligence. "Correct predictions," Hawkins contends, "result in understanding." Hawkins argues that creativity and imagination emerge from prediction as well. Imagination utilizes a neural mechanism to transform predictions into a form of sensory input—which is why our fantasies have such a strong "feel." Moving on, Hawkins says that true machine intelligence will arise only if it is rooted in the same principles as brain-based intelligence. By the book’s end, Hawkins proffers a "comprehensive theory of how the brain works," of "what intelligence is," and of "how your brain creates it." He acknowledges that many aspects of his theory have been developed by other scientists and that his role is to weave a comprehensive explanation. As such, this book provides some provocative thoughts on how the brain and the mind may actually function.

Richard Lipkin

From Booklist
A successful designer of handheld computers, Hawkins here explains (with help from New York Times science writer Blakeslee) his passion for artificial intelligence (AI). He holds that AI research has been on an unpromising path toward developing a program big and fast enough to be pronounced "intelligent." Such a brute-force approach is not how the human brain functions, so by way of proposing an alternative AI strategy, Hawkins explains how our brains work, admitting that his views are speculative. He delves into the anatomy of the neocortex, the thin structure that covers the brain and is the seat of higher-level thought. Hawkins virtually encapsulates for a popular audience the scientific literature on how the neocortex constructs a model of the world. The author becomes quite detailed in his explanations of memory formation yet never digresses from his core precept that intelligence is prediction. His argument is complex but comprehensible, and his curiosity will intrigue anyone interested in the lessons neurobiology may hold for AI. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

"On Intelligence will have a big impact; everyone should read it. In the same way that Erwin Schrödinger's 1943 classic What is Life? made how molecules store genetic information then the big problem for biology, On Intelligence lays out the framework for understanding the brain."
--James D. Watson, president, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and Nobel laureate in Physiology

"Brilliant and embued with startling clarity. On Intelligence is the most important book in neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence in a generation."
--Malcolm Young, neurobiologist and provost, University of Newcastle

"Read this book. Burn all the others. It is original, inventive, and thoughtful, from one of the world's foremost thinkers. Jeff Hawkins will change the way the world thinks about intelligence and the prospect of intelligent machines."
-- John Doerr, partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

Rating 4.5

Good "Popular Science", not a breakthrough

It is pretty clear that there are two classes of reviews for this book. One class, typically written by lay people, believes it to be the best research available on how the human brain truly works. Scientists, however, view the book a bit differently.

I am a researcher in robotics and specialize in developing control systems for autonomous robots. My company builds robots that can move around, and that have arms with which to pick up objects, all working without human control. Vision and touch are the senses used by our machines, combined with biologically inspired computer algorithms, to get the job done. Most of my work, like that of Mr. Hawkins, focuses on thinking about how animal brains might work and applying those thoughts to real systems.

I believe that Mr. Hawkins is a very sharp guy, and he describes his ideas about how the brain works with great clarity. He is outstanding at creating buzz. But, with all due respect, I believe that he doesn't even know what he doesn't know when it comes to building systems that work in the real world. The book reads as if the theories espoused are based on science, but they are really based on the author's conjecture. True, it is reasonable conjecture, but not fact. Software reportedly has been written based on these theories that is capable of recognizing hand drawn objects. I have not found any papers to review concerning this technology, but similar technology (e.g. OCR) is already available that is robust when recognizing hand drawn characters so this is not yet a tremendous breakthrough. Basically, working with 2D images is relatively easy, working with a computer generated 3D world is 10x harder, working with real imagery in a constrained environment (in a lab with controlled lighting, etc.) is 10x harder still, and working outdoors in the real world is about 100x harder than that. Current technology for autonomous robotic control and object recognition is not based on techniques of classical AI, but is in fact based on pattern recognition/matching techniques essentially similar to what Mr. Hawkins proposes, including the idea of prediction.

On the one hand, I applaud the author if this book inspires other people to enter the field. On the other hand, readers are cautioned that this is a "popular science" book and does not represent any great breakthrough.

Thought provoking and truly fascinating.

Jeff Hawkins' day job has been the creation of the Palm Pilot and the Handspring Treo, along with the Grafitti writing system used on those devices. His "hobby" - and a very serious one it seems from this book - is studying how the human brain works.

Hawkins has been bothered by the lack of a unifying theory of what the brain actually does that makes it intelligent and the absense of a good book on the topic for the lay-person. On Intelligence is his response to those concerns. The book is one big hypothesis on what is going on inside all of our heads that separates us from even the fastest computers. The crux of the issue is that our brains are pattern storage and pattern recognition devices that use those two functions to incessantly make predictions about what is coming next in the world around us.

The evidence and explanations that Hawkins offers up are compelling and fascinating and his theory conceptually makes sense when you think about it. In the end Hawkins happily admits - and we as the reader need to remember - that what he is doing is offering up a hypothesis for science to work with, prove and disprove as the study of the human mind advances.

Highly recommended for the interested lay-person by an interested lay-person.

I couldn't recommend a book more highly!!!

I have always been curious about how the brain works, and why it can do things that computers that work a million times faster cannot begin to achieve. I thought this book might be too difficult for me because I am not a scientist, but it was not compicated. It tackles what I used to think must be an infinitely complex subject in a simple and interesting way for the average person, through great writing, common sense explanations and simple analogies. They do an excellent job of avoiding getting into the details that confuse and bore non-scientists. I started reading it out of curiosity, and then I could not put it down. If you have a brain, hope to have a brain someday, or have any interest at all in how brains work, you should read this book!
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