Cameron will be happy. He’s got a bet going with Shane Williamson that machines will take over mankind by the end of the decade. Lucky for him Cyberdyne Jeff Hawkins and Numenta are on the case.

Hawkins, the inventor of the Palm and the Treo, gave a presentation at the PC Forum tech conference, and subsequently Future Boy at Business 2.0 wrote an article that explains his research. Essentially he believes that he knows how the brain works, and can migrate this type of model to computers.

All the brain does is store and recall patterns. Every sensory input — whether sight, sound, touch, taste, or smell — is translated into a sequence of patterns that is stored in the neocortex. “Through exposure,” Hawkins explained, “it builds a model of the world. The point of this model is when you come across new things every moment of your waking life, it looks at the previous stored experiences and then predicts what will happen in the future.” The way it remembers the past, then, is as a sequence of patterns, stored as connections hardwired between brain cells.

Simple hey. Now why didn’t I think of that ;)

I love this quote from Hawkins on why the brain is intelligent, because “it lets you imagine the future.”

Hawkins also explains why he believes that computing power won’t be the issue.

Much less computing power is involved. Instead, storage will be the limiting factor, because the more patterns and information these machines can store, the more they will be able to learn.

Time to buy shares in Seagate.

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