As I promised on June 15, I have tried to persist with reading On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins, in spite of the fact that my skepticism seems to grow by leaps and bounds as I progress into the book. I have decided that, having made it into Chapter 3, I am now more comfortable with faulting Hawkins for unawareness of relevant material, because it extends way beyond what Pribram had already written when Hawkins was working on his own book. I am also more comfortable with taking Hawkins to task for such neglect on the basis of a news story that broke on June 28.Before resolving that cryptic reference, let me relate it to the book. Hawkins basically uses the first two chapters of his book to unload his disappointment with both artificial intelligence and connectionism. In the latter chapter he brings up the specific example of Nestor, a company that was trying to use connectionism for handwriting recognition. Hawkins' punch line is basically about how he did a better job without neural network technology. The "better job," as those who know about Hawkins can guess, was the Graffiti system for entering handwritten text on a Palm. June 28 is the day that CNET News.com (and just about every other news source) reported that the Xerox patent suit against Palm had finally been settled; and Palm would pay Xerox $22.5 million. So, is there are price for being unaware of what others are doing in your field of interest? In this case the price was $22.5 million (although I doubt that similar negligence in the study of how the brain works would command an equally high price)!
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