Hawkins ideas on building AI's

From: dan michaels (feedbackdroids_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 10/20/04 

Date: 20 Oct 2004 07:53:28 -0700

I haven't gotten my hands on Jeff Hawkins book On Intelligence yet,
but I read a fairly good review of his idea of how to build AI.

Basically, it looks at intelligence in the same way that Dennett has
talked about - ie, "the purpose of the brain is to predict future",
and also takes into account the massive feedback systems that work in
the brain. Hawkins apparently doesn't go into much neurophysiology in
his book, but a lot of this is discussed in John McCrone's book Going
Inside, which was mentioned in a thread not long ago, especially the
part about how anticipation can be generated in the dynamical model of
the brain. One pertinent fact is that areas of the visual system
receive up to 5X-10X as many feedback fibers as direct input fibers.
Hawkin's model also takes into account certain ideas regards
differences.

The short term for Hawkin's idea is "memory-prediction model" ...
while lower layers process raw data of vision (and other senses), a
running stream of 'expectations' is pulled from memory based upon what
was just sensed. If what is detected conflicts with the expectations,
then a message signalling unfamiliarity is sent up to the top layers
to gain attention. [nice loops].

His definition for "intelligence" is simply .... the ability to form
an internal model of the world, and use it to make predictions that
abet survival. Works for humans, and also for other animals.

He apparently feels that drives and emotions are superfluous to
building AI's, but of course, use of sophisticated sensor arrays is
inherent in the idea. Such machines would use massive amounts of
memory, and high processing speeds to create on-going expectations.

The famous dalmatian picture is even mentioned in the context of ...
the brain resolves ambiguous images by continually feeding back
predictions to its visual system ... something which, it says, today's
computer vision systems don't do. People like John.C, who do CV work,
will have to compare this to what various other people are doing with
CV today.