Jeff Hawkins (1) (1957–)

Author is one of the top people in consumer tech (created Palm Pilot), and is deeply interested in AI. He does a pretty good job of presenting a few elements of the field (neural networks, primarily, and that prediction is the most key activity in the neocortex) to a general audience, and then includes some of his own theories and predictions (which is tricky because it's hard for a non-expert to know which parts are broadly accepted and which are his own theories...). Overall, a very interesting book, and since it's nearly 20 years old, it's interesting to see which of his predictions were accurate (things took about 10-20% longer than he predicted, I think, but were much more successful than he predicted); always neat when someone's errors in "wild predictions" are that they were too conservative in some way.

I honestly don't know anywhere near enough about neuroscience to really evaluate that portion or his presentation, but the more general information/cs part was pretty solid.

Most interesting thing to me was the theory that the neocortex evolved to make predictions better in animals, which is a great way to have it merge with the sensory and motor control parts of lower elements of the brain, and provides an incremental and continuous benefit from even slight levels of new capability all the way up to what we have in humans today.… (más)