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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
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On Intelligence summary
Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee
How a New Understanding of the Brain Will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines
14 mins
Brief summary
On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee explains how the brain's neocortex works and how it creates intelligence. The authors propose a new theory of intelligence, which is based on the idea that the brain is a memory system that stores experiences, not just facts.
Table of Contents
On Intelligence
Summary of 6 key ideas
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Key idea 1 of 6
Making computers more powerful will not make them more intelligent.
In the past decades, computers have become ever smaller and more powerful.
This development has inspired some researchers to dream of a computer powerful enough to actually think like a human being. However, despite the fact that modern computers have much more raw processing power than the human brain, they are still nowhere near intelligent, i.e., capable of being creative and understanding, and of learning from the world around them.
That’s because computers and our brains are built on fundamentally different principles.
Computers are programmed to do certain tasks, and that’s the extent of their abilities. They never learn anything new, but rather just store information without the ability of using it later to understand new incoming information.
The brain, on the other hand, is not limited to pre-programmed tasks, but can understand and learn new things. That’s what makes it intelligent.
For example, one famous computer, Deep Blue, beat Garry Kasparov, the world’s best chess player, at his own game. But Deep Blue didn’t win because it was more intelligent than Kasparov.
An expert chess player like Kasparov can look at the board in any situation and instantly judge what moves make sense for his strategy and what kind of counter-response will follow. A computer, however, can only run the numbers of every single possible move and countermove, calculating the probabilities to victory. It does not understand chess any more than a pocket calculator understands the rules of math, despite its capacity for adding up numbers.
In this sense, making processors more powerful or adding more memory capacity won’t necessarily help make computers intelligent. Rather, it will only make them faster at calculating – a task computers already perform better than humans. Nevertheless, computers still won’t be able to understand the world and think about the information they store the way humans do.
It thus seems that the first step in building a truly intelligent machine will be understanding the workings of the human brain.
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What is On Intelligence about?
These blinks provide an overview of the human brain’s capacity for thinking and for comparing new experiences to old memories. They also explain why today’s machines still aren’t able to emulate this capability, but why we may soon be able to build ones that can.
Who should read On Intelligence?
- Anyone interested in how the brain works or what makes us intelligent and conscious beings
- Anyone who wants to know whether we’ll ever build machines that are truly intelligent
- Anyone wondering whether such intelligent machines would be good or bad for humanity
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