A Thousand Brains - MXHDR BookWyrm

Hardcover, 288 pages

Published March 2, 2021 by Basic Books.

ISBN:: 978-1-5416-7581-0

(1 review)

An author, neuroscientist, and computer engineer unveils a theory of intelligence, of understanding the brain and the future of AI. For all of neuroscience's advances, we've made little progress on its biggest question: How do simple cells in the brain create intelligence? Jeff Hawkins and his team discovered that the brain uses maplike structures to build a model of the world-not just one model, but hundreds of thousands of models of everything we know. This discovery allows Hawkins to answer important questions about how we perceive the world, why we have a sense of self, and the origin of high-level thought.

1 edition

Tania J. reviewed A Thousand Brains by Richard Dawkins

Good job presenting a complex new theory of the brain

4 stars

The main reason this book was on my reading list is that I studied some of Hawkin's company's machine learning research as part of my master thesis.

In the first part of the book Hawkins proposes an alternative to the commonly accepted "hierarchical" theory of the brain - the "thousand brains theory". It was an interesting read but didn't really convince me of its validity, possibly due to my neuroscience knowledge being too basic to properly digest what he was saying. Or maybe I just like to know all the details before I can accept new concepts, and i realise it may not be ideal for a book like this to present all those details. I will just have to do my own further research, for which he did give some pointers for that at the end.

I like his take on machine consciousness in part 2, and he made …

The main reason this book was on my reading list is that I studied some of Hawkin's company's machine learning research as part of my master thesis.

In the first part of the book Hawkins proposes an alternative to the commonly accepted "hierarchical" theory of the brain - the "thousand brains theory". It was an interesting read but didn't really convince me of its validity, possibly due to my neuroscience knowledge being too basic to properly digest what he was saying. Or maybe I just like to know all the details before I can accept new concepts, and i realise it may not be ideal for a book like this to present all those details. I will just have to do my own further research, for which he did give some pointers for that at the end.

I like his take on machine consciousness in part 2, and he made some good arguments about why machine intelligence will not be an existential risk.

Part 3 was mostly predictions about the future of humans and machines. There were a couple of interesting thoughts in the mix, but overall nothing major that one doesn't already consider as someone who works in ML research.