#255 — The Future of Intelligence

**Sam Harris** (0:06)
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Today, I'm speaking with Jeff Hawkins. Jeff is the co-founder of Numenta, a neuroscience research company, and also the founder of the Redwood Neuroscience Institute. And before that, he was one of the founders of the field of handheld computing, starting Palm and Handspring. He's also a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and he's the author of two books. The first is On Intelligence, and the second and most recent is A Thousand Brains, A New Theory of Intelligence. And Jeff and I talk about intelligence from a few different sides here. We start with the brain. We talk about how the cortex creates models of the world, the role of prediction in experience. We discuss the idea that thought is analogous to movement in conceptual space. But for the bulk of the conversation, we have a debate about the future of artificial intelligence and in particular, the alignment problem and the prospect that AI could pose some kind of existential risk to us. As you'll hear, Jeff and I have very different takes on that problem. Our intuitions divide fairly sharply. And as a consequence, we have a very spirited exchange.
Anyway, it was a lot of fun. I hope you enjoy it.
And now I bring you Jeff Hawkins.
I'm here with Jeff Hawkins. Jeff, thanks for joining me.

**Jeff Hawkins** (2:30)
Thanks for having me, Sam. It's a pleasure.

**Sam Harris** (2:32)
I think we met probably just once, but I feel like we met about 15 years ago at one of those Beyond Belief conferences at the Salk Institute. Does that ring a bell?

**Jeff Hawkins** (2:42)
You know, I was at one of the Beyond Belief conferences, and I don't recall meeting you there, but it's totally possible. And I just-

**Sam Harris** (2:49)
Yeah, it's possible we didn't meet, but I remember, I think we had an exchange where, you know, one of us was in the audience and the other was in me. So we had an exchange over 50 feet or whatever.

**Jeff Hawkins** (3:00)
Yeah. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah, I was in the audience and I was speaking up.

**Sam Harris** (3:04)
Yeah, okay. And I was probably on stage defending some cockamamie conviction.
Well, anyway, nice to almost meet you once again. And you have a new book, which we'll cover part of, by no means exhausting its topics of interest, but the new book is A Thousand Brains.
And it's a work of neuroscience and also a discussion about the frontiers of AI and where all this is heading. But maybe we should start with the brain part of it and start with the really novel and circuitous and entrepreneurial route you've taken to get into neuroscience. This is the non-standard course to becoming a neuroscientist. Give us your brief biography here. How did you get into these topics?

**Jeff Hawkins** (3:56)
Well, I fell in love with brains when I was just got out of college. So I studied electrical engineering in college and right after I started my first job at Intel, I read an article by Francis Crick about brains and how we don't understand their work. And I just became enamored. I said, oh my God, we should understand this. This is me, I am my brain. And no one seems to know how this thing is working. And I just couldn't accept that.
And so I decided to dedicate my life to figuring out what's going on when I'm thinking and how we, you know, who we are basically as a species.
And it was a difficult path. So I quit my job. I essentially applied to become a graduate student first at MIT in AI, but then I settled at Berkeley in neuroscience. And I said, okay, I'm gonna, you know, we're gonna spend my life figuring how the neocortex works. And I found out very quickly that that was a very, not difficult thing to do scientifically, but difficult to do from the practical aspects of science that you couldn't get funding for that. It was considered too ambitious. You know, there was theoretical work and people didn't fund theoretical work. So after a couple of years as a graduate student at Berkeley, I set a different path. I said, okay, I'm gonna go back to work in industry for a few years to mature, to figure out how to make institutional change because I was up against an institutional problem, not just a scientific problem.