George Rebane
Jeff Hawkins, cofounder of Numenta, is the author of A Thousand Brains – A new theory of intelligence (2021). To many, me included, Hawkins has been a national treasure since his first book On Intelligence (2004). After inventing the Palm Pilot and becoming wealthy, Hawkins has devoted his life to brain research as it impacts our understanding of intelligence, consciousness, and our ability to create machines with these attributes. In this enterprise he and his colleagues have devised a new understanding of how our brain’s architecture, specifically the neocortex, is able to perform all the wondrous functions which we all take for granted.
My son-in-law who is a senior AI researcher at Microsoft Research, sent me the book as part of our ongoing conversation that includes the art of the possible in intelligence studies and, of course, the Singularity. For me Hawkins’ book was an immediate page-turner that jumped to the head of my list of books-in-progress. The 257-page book is divided into three parts: A New Understanding of the Brain, Machine Intelligence, and Human Intelligence.
In the first part Hawkins builds on the work of famed neuroscientist Vernon Mountcastle, who revealed the structure of the neocortex (the new brain) as consisting of hundreds of thousands of cortical columns or cores, each of them with pretty much the same make-up of interconnected neurons which also have very select and important dendritic connections to other cores, often located on the other side of the brain. The important concept here is that the cortical column is itself a tiny brain that is able to learn and retain ‘frames’ of perceived reality which it then assembles with other cores containing complementary frames to result in a voting process from which our experienced reality emerges.
These common components that make up the neocortex are ubiquitous in their functioning. When those that get inputs from our visual subsystem, these become visual processors and generate our visual world; when connected to our auditory subsystem, they do auditory processing and create our world of sounds, and so on. Hawkins’ exposition of how these cortical cores connect to our sensors, manipulanda (e.g. hands, feet), and parts of our ‘old brain’ is an absorbing read. On every page, the reader’s brain is coming up with all sorts of alternative AI implementations that have now been introduced into his art of the possible.
And for me the stuff I learned in the first part makes the second part on machine intelligence very exciting. The people at Numenta and other similar AI companies are all experimenting with synthesizing software and hardware structures that can mimic the functions of the cortical core, and then devising ingenious architectures that join thousands of these cores into new kinds of learning machines. The commonly recognized holy grail among these enterprises is AGI – artificial generalized intelligence, of which today not even the most advanced forms of deep learning artificial neural nets are capable. All of the ballyhooed AIs today are still one-tune bands, no matter how sophisticated tunes they are able to recognize and play. None can efficiently construct their surrounding reality and transfer that knowledge (i.e. generalize) to operate in different environments or situations like any year-old human infant, or, for that matter, as can a lot of critters.
‘I robot’ welcomes ‘I quit’
George Rebane
RR reader and longtime friend sent me a current piece on the theme of machines replacing humans in the workplace (here). The article focuses on the current labor crunch reported under the ‘I quit’ spate of news articles. Hard to tell how many jobs are actually going unfilled, but the number is somewhere north of 6M. Workers are not applying for a couple of reasons – they don’t have the skillsets required and they’re already getting enough government payouts to support their lifestyles.
As you might guess, those greedy capitalists with open job slots are not just sitting on their thumbs. They are doing everything possible to reduce the cost of expensive, undependable, recalcitrant, and quirky labor and substitute machines wherever possible. The more workers, on or off the job, resist, the faster the development and acquisition of replacement robots.
But I and most observers of this process believe that the road to robotics will not be traveled quietly with just the judicious substitution of universal basic income (UBI). One of the core attributes of Man is his irrepressible demand to be relevant in his environment, no matter the size of his UBI check. This will give rise to a spate of modern age luddite riots demanding that robots be excluded from a catalog of jobs to be reserved for humans. These uprisings will be promoted and championed by leftwing politicians within a whole new category of vote-buying policies.
RR is a repository of many commentaries that deal with this most human problem of pre-Singularity systemic unemployment. A sampling of these from just the last ten years are available here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Posted at 12:36 PM in Culture Comments, Our Country, Our World, Singularity Signposts, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (7)
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