[X4]

It's fascinating stuff going on there at Numenta. Thanks for submitting this!

People have had huge expectations for so many decades in AI Research that it led to a bad image. But something with that is wrong, because every step towards understanding the brain brought all of us a step forward.

We know Nature is brilliant, so it's absolutely logical that it can't get copied by some funky scientists over the weekend. Could've been the great AI depression, but we'll get over it. I think the entire disappointment spiral led the AI Community to get treated like "wadda wadda wadda".

To me it appears like when a prehistoric human finds laser technology from a crashed UFO and doesn't know what to do with it. Making him disappointed about laser technology. So before whining about how slow we find things out about ourselves, the human brain and the mind we should better invest more in education. The more people can research this topic the faster we get amazing results.

When the research in a topic doesn't yield a promising result it doesn't mean the researchers are incompetent, it means we just don't have enough education or researchers who can complete the puzzle.

Before consuming popular information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Lasswell

At the time the Numenta stuff got popular, the critics also got a voice: http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2010/04/ben-g... and http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/ray_kurzweil_does...

PS: enjoy the earworm: http://www.musick8.com/mclips/34wadda.mp3

[felipemnoa]

Inventing/Discovering Strong AI will be one of the greatest achievements of all time in my opinion. It will change our world in ways unimaginable. Our standard of living will go up for everybody, even the poorest nations. I just hope that we don't manage to kill ourselves with that technology.

How could we kill ourselves with such technology? Simple, the government will probably weaponize AI, build robots with it. An agent somewhere will issue a command to "eliminate such and such", the robot will understand it as eliminate humanity because of a bug in its system. Due to bad luck the safeguards that are to prevent this also fail. i.e. This would be like a cascading failure that brings down airplanes.

Upon receiving its orders the first thing the robot will do is that it goes into hiding, it replicates itself as much as possible while remaining undetected. Several decades letters all of its descendants detonate all of the world's nuclear arsenal along with the new ones they've built. Mission accomplished. (I think this is the plot for my first SciFi book!)

[aufreak3]

I was first exposed to HTMs through Jeff Hawkins' book "On Intelligence". I found the explanatory power behind HTMs comparable to what the theory of evolution could do. That got me both excited and cautious ... or perhaps "cautiously optimistic" is the right phrase. Glad to see Numenta making strides here in a way that keeps them anchored in today's problems, but the announcement page reads like a business "story" and I imagine some Numenta engineers groaning behind the scenes :)

Alan Kay said that he would be the "first and the loudest to applaud" when HTMs show significant results. It doesnt mean as much but I would certainly compete with him for that position :)

[joe_the_user]

Yes,

It's great see to this bear some fruit.

Jeff's TED talk is a great overview of his approach: http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_hawkins_on_how_brain_science_w...

AI, well naturally, is a very hard problem and imho will require powerful and original thinking. So it is fabulous to have someone pushing us (well, brain scientists in this case) to see the forest for the trees.