[rdtsc]

> ... people seem to give Numenta a very dogmatic approval and anyone who seems to question it on discussion boards gets flamed in a religious manner.

I wonder why that is? Is it that Numenta is doing good nerd-marketing. It appeals well to the technical crowd (not AI experts but to people who love technology / programming ). I think among that crowd (and I am one of them) there is the hope that maybe the AI revolution is finally here. This one approach will take us "over the edge" into some kind of singularity. Over the years there have always been what seemed to be very promising "revolutionary" approaches that always made it seem a machine passing the Turing Test is "just around the corner". Wanting to have this hope and wanting to dream is what keeps these kind of stories going.

I am no AI expert but just judging from what I know and if I had to make a guess I would say this is mostly marketing. It seems to me AI is not a field where an "outsider" comes, gives TED talk, writes a book and now we have a revolution. In a way, to me this smells like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science type situation. Maybe I am just jaded and skeptical and good thing I am not involved in any such research (I would have given up and nothing would have been discovered) so I am glad people are researching and keep working on the problem, I just don't think this is "it" yet.