[joe_the_user]

Well,

It seems like there ought to be a level between "simulating the brain" and just coming up with your own algorithm. I would imagine that level as "seeing what the brain can do at a particular low level, seeing how close you can come to duplicating that, see what unique approach you can derive there, apply to other other, repeat". That level would be "inspired by the brain without trying to simulate it". It seems like in his popular talks Hawkins implies he's doing that but that in his actual software, as you mention, he winds-up doing just a variation of standard machine learning.

It would be nice if he had postponed deciding he had a solution and instead kept banging on the problem of what algorithms can be kind of like X or Y thing that the brain appears to do. I'd like to think you could mine a bunch of ideas from this.