YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeff Hawkins

lines on the record: 180
first: 2021-08-08
most recent: 2021-08-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“It also, yeah, but you can then extend it to things like what would happen if I took this today, I went and did this, what would be likely, or how you can extend prediction to like, oh, I want to get a promotion at work. What action should I take? And you can say, well, I did this. I predict what might happen. If I spoke to someone, I predict what might happen. So it's not just low-level predictions.”
2021-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #208 – Jeff Hawkins: The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything you see and feel. In fact, this was the insight I had back in the late 80s, excuse me, early 80s, and another people repeats the same idea, is that every sensory input you get, not just vision, but touch and hearing, you have an expectation about it and a prediction. Sometimes you can predict very accurately, sometimes you can't. I can't predict what next word is going to come out of your mouth. But as you start talking, I'll get better and better predictions. And if you talked about some topics, I'd be very surprised. So I have this sort of background prediction that's going on all the time for all my senses. Again, the way I think about that is this is how we learn. It's more about how we learn. It's a test of our understanding. Our predictions are a test. Is this really a water bottle? If it is, I shouldn't see, you know, a little finger sticking out the side.”
2021-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #208 – Jeff Hawkins: The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so all those might have a prediction like, okay, I'm gonna do it. I'll drink some water. I'm okay, okay, I do this, there it is, I feel opening, right? What if I had to turn it the other way? Or what if it's split in two? Then I say, oh my gosh, I'd misunderstood this. I didn't have the right model, this thing. Attention would be drawn to I'll be looking at it going, Well, how the hell did that happen? Why did it open up that way? And I would update my model by doing it, just by looking at it and playing around with that update and say, this is a new type of water model.”
2021-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #208 – Jeff Hawkins: The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's fundamental to building a model and the model's intelligent. And let me go back and be very precise about this. Prediction, you can think of prediction two ways. One is like, hey, what would happen if I did this? That's the type of prediction. That's a key part of intelligence. But using prediction is like, oh, this water bottle going to feel like when I pick it up. And that doesn't seem very intelligent. But the way to think, one way to think about a prediction is it's a way for us to learn where our model is wrong. So if I picked up this water bottle and it felt hot, I'd be very surprised. Or if I picked up was very light, it would be very, I'd be surprised. Or if I turn this top and it didn't, I had to turn it the other way, I'd be surprised.”
2021-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #208 – Jeff Hawkins: The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To I want to convey a new idea I've learned. How would I do that? I can imagine in my head, well, I could talk about it, I could write a book, I could do some podcasts, I could, you know, maybe tell my neighbor, you know, and I can imagine the outcomes of all these things before I do any of them. That's what the model lets you do. Let's just plan the future and imagine the consequences of our actions. Prediction, you asked about prediction, prediction is not the goal of the model. Prediction is an inherent property of it, and it's how the model corrects itself.”
2021-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #208 – Jeff Hawkins: The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, how far would it get from the garage to the swimming pool or something like that, right? You can imagine looking at this. You can say, what would be the view from this location? So we build these physical models to let you imagine the future and imagine behaviors. Now, we can take that same model and put it in a computer. So we now, today, they all build models of houses in a computer. And they do that using a set of, we'll come back to this term in a moment, reference frames, but eventually you assign a reference frame for the house and you assign different things for the house in different locations. And then the computer can generate an image and say, okay, this is what it looks like in this direction. The brain is doing something remarkably similar to this, surprising. It's using reference frames. It's building it's similar to a model in a computer, which has the same benefits of building a physical model. It allows me to say, what would this thing look like if it was in this orientation? What would likely happen if I push this button? I've never pushed this button before. Or how would I accomplish something?”
2021-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #208 – Jeff Hawkins: The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here's the way to think about the model. A lot of people get hung up on this. So you can imagine an architect making a model of a house. So there's a physical model that's small. And why do they do that? Well, we do that because you can imagine what it would look like from different angles. You can say, okay, I look from here, look there. And you can also say.”
2021-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #208 – Jeff Hawkins: The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you obviously can learn things just by reading a book, something like that. But think about it if I were to say, oh, here's a new house. I want you to learn, you know, what do you do? You have to walk, you have to walk from room to room. You have to open the doors, look around, see what's on the left, what's on the right. As you do this, you're building a model in your head. It's just that's what you're doing. You can't just sit there and say, I'm going to grock the house. No, you know, or you can, you don't even want to just sit there and read some description of it, right? You literally physically interact. The same with like a smartphone. If I want to learn a new app, I touch it and I move things around and I see what happens when I...”
2021-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #208 – Jeff Hawkins: The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Turns out you have to learn it through movement. You can't learn it just by, that's how we learn. We learn through movement. We learn. So you build up this model by observing things and touching them and moving them and walking around the world and so on.”
2021-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #208 – Jeff Hawkins: The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Smarter Not that there is a single intelligence, because you can know about, you know a lot about things that I don't know, and I know about things you don't know. And we can both be very smart. But we both learn the model of the world through interacting with it. So that is the essence of intelligence. Then we can ask ourselves, what are the mechanisms in the brain that allow us to do that? And what are the mechanisms of learning, not just the neural mechanisms, what is the general process for how we learn a model? So that was a big insight for us. It's like, what are the actual things that how do you learn this stuff?”
2021-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #208 – Jeff Hawkins: The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can we just talk about what intelligence is first and then we can talk about the elements? So in my book, intelligence is the ability to learn a model of the world, to build internal to your head. Model that represents the structure of everything to know that this is a table and that's a coffee cup and this is a gooseneck lamp and all this thing to know these things I have to have a model in my head. I just don't look at them and go, what is that? I already have internal representations of these things in my head. And I had to learn them. I wasn't born of any of that knowledge. We have some lights in the room here. That's not part of my evolutionary heritage, right? It's not in my genes. We have this incredible model. And the model includes not only what things look like and feel like, but where they are relative to each other and how they behave. I've never picked up this water bottle before, but I know that if I took my hand on that blue thing and I turn it, it'll probably make a funny little sound as the little plastic things detach and then it'll rotate and it'll rotate a certain way and it'll come off. How do I know that I have this model in my head? So the essence of intelligence as our ability to learn.”
2021-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #208 – Jeff Hawkins: The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shared anywhere else. There's no way to extract it and talk about it or extract it and even remember it to say, oh, yes, I can recall that. But these long-range connections are the things that are accessible to language and to our, you know, it's like the hippocampus, our memories, our short-term memory systems and so on. So we're not aware of 95% or maybe it's even 98% of what's going on in your brain. We're only aware of this sort of stable, somewhat stable voting outcome of all these things that are going on underneath the hood.”
2021-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #208 – Jeff Hawkins: The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the volunteer. Well, you can imagine it this way. We were just talking about eye movements a moment ago. So as I'm looking at something, my eyes are moving about three times a second. And with each movement, a completely new input is coming into the brain. It's not repetitive. It's not shifting it around. It's completely, you know, I'm totally unaware of it. I can't perceive it. But yet, if I looked at the neuroengineer in your brain, they're going, I don't know if I don't know if. But the voting neurons are not. The voting neurons are saying, you know, we all agree, even though I'm looking at different parts of this, this is a water bottle right now. And that's not changing. And it's in some position and pose relative to me. So I have this perception of the water bottle about two feet away from me at a certain pose to me. That is not changing. That's the only part I'm aware of. I can't be aware of the fact the input from the eyes are moving and changing and all this other's tapping. So these long range connections are the part we can be conscious of. The individual activity in each column doesn't go anywhere else. It doesn't get...”
2021-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #208 – Jeff Hawkins: The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are only consciously able to perceive the voting. We're not able to perceive anything that goes under the hood. So the voting is what we're aware of.”
2021-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #208 – Jeff Hawkins: The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So essentially, we have a singular perception, right? You know, we think, oh, I'm just here, I'm looking at you, but it's composed of all these things. There's sounds and there's this vision and there's touch and all kinds of inputs. Yet we have the singular perception. And what the Thousand Brain Theory says, we have these models that are visual models. We have models, auditory models, models of talk to models and so on. But they vote. And so in the cortex, you can think about these columns as little grains of rice, 150,000 stacked next to each other. And each one is its own little modeling system. But they have these long-range connections that go between them. And we call those voting connections or voting neurons. And so the different columns try to reach a consensus. Like, what am I looking at? Okay, each one has some ambiguity, but they come to a consensus. Oh, there's a water bottle I'm looking at.”
2021-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #208 – Jeff Hawkins: The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About 150,000 of them in each human brain. And that's a total different way of thinking about how the New York Cortex is structured then. We or anyone else thought of even just five years ago.”
2021-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #208 – Jeff Hawkins: The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the Thousand Brains Theory, the big idea there, if I had to summarize it into one big idea, is that we think of the brain, the neocortex, as learning this model of the world. But what we learned is actually there's tens of thousands of independent modeling systems going on. And so each, what we call a column in the cortex, there's about 150,000 of them, is a complete modeling system. So it's a collective intelligence in your head in some sense. So the Thousand Brains Theory says, well, where do I have knowledge about this coffee cup? Where's the model of this cell phone? It's not in one place. It's in thousands of separate models that are complementary and they communicate with each other through voting. So this idea that we have, we feel like we're one person. That's our experience. We can explain that. But reality, there's lots of these almost like little brands, but they're sophisticated modeling systems.”
2021-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #208 – Jeff Hawkins: The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The book has three sections And it has sort of maybe three big ideas. So the first section is all about what we've learned about the neurocortex, and that's the thousand brains theory. Just to complete the picture, the second section is all about AI, and the third section is about the future of humanity.”
2021-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #208 – Jeff Hawkins: The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do I think? What's going on in my head when I'm thinking? What does it mean to know something? I can ask what it means for me to know something independent of how I learned it from you or from someone else or from society. What does it mean for me to know that I have a model of you in my head? What does it mean to know I know what this microphone does and how it works physically, even if I can't see it right now? How do I know that? What does it mean? How do the neurons do that at the fundamental level of neurons and synapses and so on? Those are really fascinating questions. And I'm happy to understand those if I could.”
2021-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #208 – Jeff Hawkins: The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I mean, we can't deny that the brain is the core element here in, at least I think it's obvious. The brain is the core element in all theories of intelligence. It's where knowledge is represented. It's where knowledge is created. We interact, we share, we build upon each other's work, but without a brain, you'd have nothing. There would be no intelligence without brains. And so that's where we start. I got into this field because I just was curious as to who I am.”
2021-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #208 – Jeff Hawkins: The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Import that to me. But it also comes down to even just the epistemological question of, well, what is knowledge and how do you represent it in the brain, right? That's where it's going to reside, right? In our writings.”
2021-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #208 – Jeff Hawkins: The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I would say it's absolutely in a central component, even if you believe in collective intelligence as. That's where it's all happening. That's what we need to study, which I don't believe that, by the way. I think it's really important, but I don't think that is the thing. But even if you do believe that, then you have to understand how the brain works in doing that. It's more like we are intelligent individuals, and together we are much more magnified, our intelligence. We can do things which we couldn't do individually. But even as individuals, we're pretty damn smart. And we can model things and understand the world and interact with it. So to me, if you're going to start someplace, you need to start with the brain. Then you could say, well, how do brains interact with each other? And what is natural language? And how do we share models that I've learned something about the world? How do I share it with you, which is really what sort of communal intelligence is. I know something, you know something. We've had different experiences in the world. I've learned something about brains. Maybe I can impart that to you. You've learned something about, you know, whatever physics.”
2021-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #208 – Jeff Hawkins: The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, okay, right. Well, I think we have language, which is sort of built into our brains, and that's a key part of collective intelligence. So there are some prior assumptions about the world we're going to live in when we're born. We're not just a blank slate. Did we evolve to take advantage of those situations? Yes. But again, we study only part of the brain, the neocortex. There's other parts of the brain are very much involved in societal and interactions and human emotions. How we interact and even societal issues about how we interact with other people when we support them, when we're greedy and things like that.”
2021-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #208 – Jeff Hawkins: The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're actually jumping to a lot of big topics like collective intelligence is a separate topic a lot of people like to talk about. We could talk about that And so that's interesting. We're not just individuals, we live in society and so on. But from our research point of view, so again, let's just talk, we studied the neocortex. It's a sheet of neural tissue. It's about 75% of your brain. It runs on this very repetitive algorithm. It's a very repetitive circuit. And so you can apply that algorithm to lots of different problems, but it's all underneath. It's the same thing. We're just building this model. So from our point of view, we wouldn't look for these special circuits someplace buried in your brain that might be related to understanding other humans. It's more like, you know, how do we build a model of anything? How do we understand anything in the world? And humans are just another part of the things we understand.”
2021-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #208 – Jeff Hawkins: The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This morning, you offered me this water said it was from the refrigerator. I remember these things. And so the model includes where we live, the places we know, the words, the objects in the world. It's just a monstrous model and it's constantly being updated and people are just part of that model. So we're animals, so are other physical objects, so are events we've done. So there's no special in my mind, special place for the memories of humans. I mean, obviously, I know a lot about my wife. But in friends and so on. But it's not like a special place for humans or over here. But we model everything and we model other people's behaviors too. So if I said you as a copy of your mind in my mind, it's just because I know how humans, I've learned how humans behave. And I learned some things about you. And that's part of my world model.”
2021-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #208 – Jeff Hawkins: The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're the exact same synapses were formed two years ago, it's hard to say because these things come and go all the time. But we know from one thing to know about brains is that when you think of things, you often erase the memory and rewrite it again. So yes, but I have a memory view and that's instantiated in synapses. There's a simpler way to think about it. So we have a model of the world in your head. And that model is continually being updated.”
2021-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #208 – Jeff Hawkins: The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Previously, talked over two years ago. Do you think they're still neurons in your brain that remember that conversation, that remember me and got excited? Like there's a Lex neuron in your brain that just like finally has a purpose? I do remember our conversation, or I have some memories of it. And I formed additional memories of you in the meantime. Wouldn't say there's a neuron or a neurons in my brain that know you, but there are synapses in my brain. Forms that reflect my knowledge of you and the model I have of you and the world.”
2021-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #208 – Jeff Hawkins: The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've actually been thinking about doing a project where I read a book a day and maybe make a video on each of those books, like especially powerful books that mean a lot to me, some of which I've already read. So rereading them, which I enjoy doing, and some of which I've always wanted to read and haven't gotten a chance. Part of me wants to return to that place of where I read basically full time for like a few weeks. I think that's a fascinating experiment I'd like to take on. Anyway, go to blinkis.com slash Lex to start your free seven-day trial and get 25% off of a Blinkus premium membership that's blinkus. com slash lex spelled BLINKISD BLINCIS. com This is the Lex Friedman podcast and here is my conversation with Jeff Hawkins.”
2021-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #208 – Jeff Hawkins: The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This episode is supported by Blinkist, my favorite app for learning new things. Blinkis takes the key ideas from thousands of nonfiction books and condenses them down into just fifteen minutes that you can read or listen to. I use it three ways one to pick which books I want to read next in full, two to review books I've already read, sort of to give me a very clean summary of what the book was about, and three sometimes there's too many amazing books in this world, you'll never get a chance to read, and it's good to sort of build up an intuition, build up a high-level understanding of the key insights in the book.”
2021-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #208 – Jeff Hawkins: The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
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2021-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #208 – Jeff Hawkins: The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source