[cervezas]

Great editorial, Brian. I found myself saying "gee, I wish I'd written that." ;-)

What I most agree with is the opportunity that GPS offers for enabling a device to be somewhat aware of context and respond accordingly. As a fan of Hawkins' work on intelligence, I too believe his Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) is going to have exciting applications for mobile devices in the future--and I think Palm knows this. However, I suspect that we are still many years away from seeing that come to practical fruition in Palm devices.

It's not just that HTM is still in an experimental state, it's also that I think its usefulness is going to depend on the development of complementary technologies that are out of Numenta's or Palm's control. For a computer to understand the context of a situation well enough that it can predict things like intentionality, it seems to me it needs not just good pattern recognition, but access to pretty rich data about the environment. It needs a nervous system, not just a neocortex. The "senses" an intelligent device might have need not correspond to the five human senses (GPS is a good example) but whatever they are they will involve some kind of continuous monitoring and processing. That means intelligent devices will likely include sensor technologies that mobile devices don't have today (maybe ones that don't even exist today) and it also means there are likely to be much larger power demands on a usefully intelligent device. Power has been a bottleneck for mobile device innovation in the past, and is likely to continue to be one for some time.

There's another thing: I expect it to take a while before HMT will be good enough not to be annoying. There may be a certain charm and fascination about your device misinterpreting a situation and making a goofy response to it, but that appeal is shortlived. An "intelligent" device will have to reach a certain threshold of correct interpretations before that kind of charm will be something you're happy to live with in a device you depend on and carry with you everywhere. The nice thing about "dumb" PDAs is that they are predictable. Add just a little intelligence to them and you may get some intriguing new functionality out of them, but you also lose some of the reliability you're accustomed to demanding of them. You may be able to get your puppy to bring you your slippers when you sit in your favorite easy chair, but that same level of mental capability also makes him likely to mistake them for small animals sometimes and chew them into small pieces. :-)

I really do believe that Hawkins is on to something, I just think it may take many years, and even after it comes out it will probably be relegated to novelty status for quite a while. But even before we get to HTM, I wholeheartedly agree that there are big opportunities to make software that better predicts the behavior we really want from it and GPS is one of the best resources to enable this kind of intelligence. You've got me thinking about it!