Listening L5⬆️ AI talk with Jeff Hawkings - 12.14.2022 Part 1

Listen up to a excerpt from an onlien interview with Jeff Hawkings, a tech entrepreneur and the author of A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence, on how different the current progress might be from what the future will look like.


Check the transcript at the end of the post, but first...

Structures to acquire



▪️ All you can do is…
All we can do is try this approach one final time and see if it works.


▪️ The way I phrase it is…
The way I would phrase it is we did our best in a difficult situation. 


▪️ None of … were possible
None of those ideas will be possible to implement unless we resolve the initial issue first.


▪️ We're gonna (going to) be able to <do>
We're going to be able to get back to you on this by the end of the week.

I think, you know, the history of technology shows that nobody is able to predict where a technology will go. All you can do is try to define or even imagine some parameters.

One of your questions, you, you, you wrote to me earlier was like, Oh, well, we can build machines that work a thou- a million times faster than in biology. And that's true.  What are the implications for that? It's very, very hard to know. Um, you know, what if we could think a million times faster, you know, that's an incredible idea. It's really difficult.

The way I sometimes phrase it is: if you look at the history of computing… Well, it started in the 1940s, maybe the late 1930s. Alan Turing and John Van Neumann and others were building these first computers in the 1940s. And they knew that computers were gonna be a really big idea, but they had no idea what was gonna happen. They couldn't imagine personal computers. They couldn't imagine GPS. They couldn't imagine floating point operations. None of this is possible to them. But they said, my God, this is an interesting idea that you could implement an algorithm, the algorithm can repeat and solve problems. It's gonna be big.
I feel like that is a lot like how we are now. We're gonna be able to build these, these intelligent machines. But we really don't know. We're in the 1940s of AI, really.