I heart Jeff Hawkins; maybe you have the knowledge to disprove his theories, but
on my way out to California I brought my Howard the Duck Essential vol. and my photocopies of Jeff's book
on neural structure and computer systems (and parts of A Brief History of Everything.)
Let me share with you where computer intelligence was in 2006. Can you tell one of these
from this?
Congratulations. You're smarter than a Machine Man. Here's some of the NPR interview:
Mr. HAWKINS: A scientist I know has proposed that the grand challenge, the million-dollar prize ought to be a machine that can tell two objects apart visually; literally, cats from dogs.
That's how far we are from doing what humans can do today. So, we're building a vision system that we believe will perform quite well, and it'll be very much like a human vision system that you'd be able to show it pictures of things in any sort of form and variation, and it'll say, and I know what it is. It'll very instantly say, oh I know, that's a cat, that's a dog, that's a car, that's a refrigerator, or whatever.
INSKEEP: Is a prototype already built?
Mr. HAWKINS: We built a small-scale prototype. It's not a practical system, in the sense it only recognizes line drawings, and it only recognizes 50 different objects. But already, I believe, and I think other people would agree, that it's pretty impressive.
An average person on the street might look at it and say, gee, well you're just recognizing a line drawing of a helicopter versus a dog, and they say, isn't that easy? Well, it is easy for humans, but it's actually a major advance in terms of technology.
INSKEEP: Does the computer ever have that very human moment of self-doubt, where it says, “Cat, no, wait, wait, wait dog! No! Cat!”
Mr. HAWKINS: In some sense. You know, first of all, these machines are not talking, or anything like that. The way they tell you the answers, they give you a little chart, we put on the a display of the computer that says, the probability of each of the things it knows. And so, when it's confused, it's basically showing a lot of probabilities that are equally high. So it says, well, a 30 percent cat, 30 percent dog, 30 percent table, or something like that. And that's how it's saying it's confused. It doesn't talk in the way a human would do.
Wish we could get into that "computer self-doubt" a bit more; Jack's story was like a Bible story relative to the story in our world.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... Id=5232103 more here
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