Modelling the brain: Another step closer to Artificial Intelligence

I have been a skeptic of being able to achieve true AI as we know human intelligence. We are talking about humans designing artificially what evolution has taken billions of years to develop.

However, I am beginning to think that I might be wrong. Jeff Hawkins - enterpreneur and scientist has been working on what is called Hierarchical Temporal Memory that tries to model the brain and this just might be the best approximation of the brain behavior we have. This video lecture has him explain its functioning and at the end of the video I come out convinced that Jeff is onto something big here. I can't help but feel that there is an opportunity to build something much more capable than the human brain overcoming biological limitations of the human body and solve very complex problems by scaling the model across powerful computers.

Jeff Hawkins company Numenta is working on commercializing this technology and has released the Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing (NuPIC) which can be downloaded from the Numenta website.