Will Hawkins, 61, have figured out the secret behind the brain? He’s been doing research into the brain for decades and recently presented his new findings at a conference in the Netherlands. Hawkins’ new discoveries show how cortical columns (the basic building blocks of the brain) function and how they affect memory and thought. It’s important to note that Hawkins’ theories do not jibe with traditional neuroscience and may not be accepted by the community.
Nevertheless, Hawkins’ ideas can be fruitful if he opens his research up to rigorous scrutiny and works in collaboration with other neuroscientists. This is the only way to produce novel theories about the brain. The question remains: Will Hawkins’ DeepMind? Theory work? Let’s find out. It’s a big step forward and one worth pondering. However, before the machine can become a reality, it needs to go through rigorous tests and experiments.
A meeting between Hawkins and Demis Hassabis took place last April in London. Hawkins was invited to speak with the founders of DeepMind, an AI lab that is backed by Alphabet. The team includes hundreds of AI researchers and seasoned neuroscientists. Hawkins also founded two classic computer companies and studied the brain. This meeting was a good opportunity for Hawkins to talk about his project and its goals.
After graduating from Cornell, Hawkins began working at Intel and then later worked at GRiD Systems, one of the first notebook companies. He was rejected from an MIT artificial intelligence program, but he continued to study the brain in order to understand it better. Later in his career, Hawkins worked for a laptop startup, GRiD Systems, and eventually took a correspondence course in physiology and applied to the University of California-Berkeley’s biophysics program.
The research team at Numenta is currently studying the human brain piece-by-piece. Hawkins says that his work represents only five percent of how humans learn, and it’s unlikely that it’ll be enough to change our world. But if Hawkins’ vision of the future comes true, he believes it’s an important step in the advancement of artificial intelligence. And he plans to put his ideas into action in the coming year.
Although some neuroscientists argue that the brain does not come preloaded with routines, his idea involves implementing fundamental brain architecture. The idea is that humans have the ability to recognize patterns in changing information, and that we can learn from this information through an ever-changing stream of data. This approach is also known as the Cortical Learning Algorithm. In other words, Hawkins is trying to mimic the brain’s ability to process stream of data.
As a research scientist, Hawkins is a strong believer in the power of the brain. His research focuses on the evolution of moral intuition, and he believes that it is fundamental to social decision-making. But Hawkins has also argued that human moral intuition is a product of attachment to the environment. And in the process, humans use the same neural pathways to make moral judgments. This theory would be able to replicate these patterns and apply it to human decisions.
Although Hawkins has been working on the technology for decades, it is unclear how successful his project will be. But his approach is highly praised and many neuroscientists admire his work. His approach has even made him a maverick in the research community, and his own work is funded. So, what’s he waiting for? We’ll probably never know, but this research is definitely worth pursuing.
Before Google’s recent acquisition of the UK company DeepMind Technologies, Hawkins’ work in the field of neuroscience was already well underway. He founded Palm Computing in 1992 and quickly developed an incredible hand-held computer. He warned his executive director Donna Dubinsky that if he continued to run the company, he’d return to his own research in neuroscience. US Robotics later purchased Palm for $ 44 million. Hawkins and Dubinsky left Palm to found Handspring. The two companies remained independent until 2000 and merged in 2003.