A ran across an article in Wired yesterday describing Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) and a company called Numenta. One of the company's co-founders is the architect of the PalmPilot and Treo, Jeff Hawkins.

I've always been interested in Artificial Intelligence, but never have dug into it too much. Obviously Computer Scientists have been attempting to solve this problem for quite some time, but largely have been unsuccessful up to this point. The founders of Numenta believe they have the correct algorithm, including the ability to scale to large problem sets. After reading several articles, I believe they might be right, but I don't want to be too optimistic at this point given that I know so little about the field.

Computers being able to learn is mind-blowing stuff. Once we teach them to learn and correspondingly make predictions and take actions, they will be able to do some amazing stuff (potentially both good and bad). Several science fiction predictions come to mind, like The Matrix and The Terminator. I want to be one of the people on the good side.

I ordered the book written by Hawkins, On Intelligence, which should be a very interesting read.