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Don’t read this book at bedtime. Not that it’s frightening. It
won’t give you nightmares. But it is so exhilarating, so
stimulating, it’ll turn your mind into a whirling maelstrom of
excitingly provocative ideas—you’ll want to rush out and tell
someone rather than go to sleep. It is a victim of this
maelstrom who writes the foreword, and I expect it’ll show.
Charles Darwin was unusual among scientists in having the
means to work outside universities and without government
research grants. Jeff Hawkins might not relish being called the
Silicon Valley equivalent of a gentleman scientist but—well, you
get the parallel. Darwin’s powerful idea was too revolutionary to
catch on when expressed as a brief article, and the
Darwin-Wallace joint papers of 1858 were all but ignored. As
Darwin himself said, the idea needed to be expressed at book
length. Sure enough, it was his great book that shook Victorian
foundations, a year later. Book-length treatment, too, is needed
for Jeff Hawkins’s Thousand Brains Theory. And for his notion
of reference frames—“The very act of thinking is a form of
movement”—bull’s-eye! These two ideas are each profound
enough to fill a book. But that’s not all. |
