A Thousand Brains

For now, it appears that our best option is to work hard to form enforceable international agreements on what is acceptable and what is not, similar to how we treat chemical weapons.

The point is that anything capable of self-replication, especially viruses and bacteria, is a potential existential threat. Intelligence, on its own, is not.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the field of artificial intelligence was viewed as a failure. When we started Numenta, we conducted market research to see what words we might use to talk about our work. We learned that the terms “AI” and “artificial intelligence” were viewed negatively by almost everyone. No company would consider using them to describe their products. The general view was that attempts to build intelligent machines had stalled and might never succeed. Within ten years, people’s impression of AI had flipped completely. It is now one of the hottest fields of research, and companies are applying the AI moniker to practically anything that involves machine learning.