We first need to understand how the brain works if we want true AI

Most people in AI don't care too much about the details, says Jeff Hawkins, a neuroscientist and tech entrepreneur. He wants to change that. Hawkins has straddled the two worlds of neuroscience and AI for nearly 40 years. In 1986, after a few years as a software engineer at Intel, he turned up at the University of California, Berkeley, to start a PhD in neuroscience, hoping to figure out how intelligence worked. But his ambition hit a wall when he was told there was nobody there to help him with such a big-picture project. Frustrated, he swapped Berkeley for Silicon Valley and in 1992 founded Palm Computing, which developed the PalmPilot--a precursor to today's smartphones.