Friday, March 17, 2006

Donna Dubinsky, Memory, and Numenta

This is interesting to me in terms of technology and ideas about memory (from Fastcompany):

Donna Dubinsky

Founder and CEO, Numenta Inc.
Menlo Park, California

Dubinsky, 50, was cofounder and CEO of Palm Computing, which created the Palm Pilot, and of Handspring (now Palm Inc.), creator of the Treo smartphone. Her current company is focused on developing a new kind of computer memory system.
First appeared in Fast Company: June/July 1998

"The next generation of computing is 'intelligent computing,' based on the same principles as the human neocortex. The human brain works in ways fundamentally different from the way computers do today, which is why computers have never been able to realize true intelligence. The brain uses vast amounts of memory to create a model of the world. Everything you know and have learned is stored in this model. The brain uses this memory-based model to make continuous predictions of future events. It's the ability to make predictions about the future that is the crux of intelligence. For example, when humans see a dog, they immediately know it's a dog, even though they may have never seen that specific dog before. Even a young child can identify 'dog' and be very certain, but a computer still can't. Intelligent computing will allow a computer to identify a dog the way the brain does, by building a memory model that has been exposed to many images of dogs such that it begins to actually understand what a dog is. The computer will become 'intelligent.'

This technology will offer a fundamental new building block for the next generation of computing and business, and it could create a new vector for innovation across a great number of industries. Over the next few decades, we think the capabilities of intelligent machines will evolve rapidly and in extremely interesting directions. Intelligent computing could be used in image identification, speaker identification, data mining, security, automobile safety, robotics, and ultimately natural-language processing. Our hope is that intelligent computing will help us accelerate our knowledge of the world, let us explore the universe, and make the world safer."
--Interview by Jennifer Pollock

I was walking along thinking about an ex, how I am now part of her past. I then thought, no, not really, I am part of her memory, which is categorized or tagged as part of or defining what is past. Memory defines time. Which defines memory as "something containing the past" when in fact maybe it is just all that there is, The repository.

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