I’ve wondered whether some of the code that Jeff Hawkins and Numenta are writing could be adapted to Elixir, Nx, Axon, et al. For example, it might be interesting to use Elixir processes to model (sets of) cortical columns…
One of Hawkins’ areas of interest is cortical columns. In 2016, he hypothesized that cortical columns did not capture just a sensation, but also the relative location of that sensation, in three dimensions rather than two (situated capture), in relation to what was around it. Hawkins explains, “When the brain builds a model of the world, everything has a location relative to everything else”.
In 2021, he published A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence, a framework for intelligence and cortical computation. The book details the advances he and the Numenta team made in the development of their theory of how the brain understands the world and what it means to be intelligent. It also details how the “thousand brains” theory can affect machine intelligence, and how an understanding of the brain impacts the threats and opportunities facing humanity. It also offers a theory of what’s missing in current AI.
