Self-healing computers will change the world: Jeff Hawkins

Self-healing computers will change the world: Jeff Hawkins

November 11, 2013 – 10:45AM

Matthew Hall

In one man’s vision of the future, helpdesks and IT departments will be redundant because computers mimicking the human brain will self-heal. That’s if Jeff Hawkins has his way. A neuroscientist who previously founded mobile computing companies Palm and Handspring, Hawkins is developing software that mimics the human brain and can currently correct computer glitches without human intervention.“It’s not an easy field,” Hawkins cautioned but the pay-off is technology that he believes will eventually change the way the world works.

Hawkins’ product is called Grok and is machine intelligence software based on the brain’s neo-cortex – the grey matter that deals with sensory perception, motor commands, and language among other functions. Machine intelligence is, Hawkins claims, the next big thing in the development of computing technology.

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“We’re figuring out how the brain’s neo-cortex works,” Hawkins said. “To the brain, vision is the same thing as listening to music. It is all the same mechanism. It is one of the beautiful things evolution discovered.”

The technology, currently equivalent to one millionth of the size of a human brain and in the earliest of early stage development – “It’s like we’re in 1943 in terms of computing development,” Hawkins said – is currently being used by Amazon’s cloud service to monitor the behaviour of its servers and by Phase 6, a language learning project based in Austria.

“We can look at data and tell you in a way that nobody else can when those [Amazon] machines are acting abnormally,” Hawkins said. “That is a big business and that is what we are attacking. It is basically machines that learn like the human brain learns. This is going to have as a big an impact in the world as computers had. It is that big a concept.”

A big call but Hawkins has previous experience being ahead of the curve. In the 1990s – long before smartphones were in everybody’s hands – he founded Palm, a company that produced hand-held personal organisers. His motivation at the time was pragmatism. Neuroscience and computers was not yet making money and Hawkins needed a job.

“I had to make a living and put some food on the table,” Hawkins recalled. “I saw a future where everybody’s personal computer was going to be in their pocket. I started talking about this in 1989 but I didn’t know how it was going to play out. I didn’t know about cell phones, there was no internet, there was no digital cameras but it was obvious to me the future was mobile devices.  When we started Palm we didn’t know how it was going to turn out but we knew it was going to be big.

“We saw a longer term vision where most people couldn’t see it. We kept slogging through it. The Palm was an organiser. How exciting was that? It wasn’t. But that is what we could do with the technology at that time.”

Hawkins, who will be making the keynote address at three YOW! conferences scheduled for Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne in December, challenges critics who may be experiencing technology fatigue.

“You could argue that we don’t need computers – we didn’t used to have them – but I would argue the vast majority of the world is benefitting in a great number of many ways from them that they wouldn’t want to go back,” Hawkins said.

“But we can now have machines that learn, machines that are smart, machines that help us figure out the problems of the world, machines that make things safe, machines that provide better medicine because they are learning. That will be good and we won’t want to come back.”

There’s a catch – and a key – to Hawkin’s latest project. The code is open source. He’s encouraging collaboration and development in the field and claims commercial success for his software is not the motivation.

“We look at this and think this is a good thing. It is going to be very good for everybody and no one is going to own it. There will be plenty of opportunity to start businesses. We are not motivated by commercial success. We are motivated by intellectual success.”