A love letter to the brain: in his new book on AI, Jeff Hawkins is enamored of thought

We live inside a body ruled by a brute, and the question for humanity may be whether we ever rise up and defy that brute. Such is, in rough outline, the key question of the human race's future in A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence, the new book about artificial intelligence, and also, surprisingly, about human impulses, by Jeff Hawkins, which went on sale this week. "What's the purpose of living, why are we here, what would be a good goal for humanity," Hawkins mused during a conversation about the book with ZDNet via Zoom last week. "Intelligence is the thing that defines us, the thing we want to preserve and propagate." Life has evolved over millions of years to perpetuate genes via reproduction. Humans, like all life, are "unwitting servants" of genes, gifted with movement and ability only for the purpose of reproduction, writes Hawkins.