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Artificial Intelligence

When I graduated from Cornell in June 1979 with a degree in electrical
engineering, I didn't have any major plans for my life. I started work as an
engineer at the new Intel campus in Portland, Oregon. The microcomputer
industry was just starting, and Intel was at the heart of it. My job was to analyze
and fix problems found by other engineers working in the field with our main
product, single board computers. (Putting an entire computer on a single circuit
board had only recently been made possible by Intel's invention of the
microprocessor.) I published a newsletter, got to do some traveling, and had a
chance to meet customers. I was young and having a good time, although I
missed my college sweetheart who had taken a job in Cincinnati.

A few months later, I encountered something that was to change my life's
direction. That something was the newly published September issue of Scientific
American, which was dedicated entirely to the brain. It rekindled my childhood
interest in brains. It was fascinating. From it I learned about the organization,
development, and chemistry of the brain, neural mechanisms of vision, movement,
and other specializations, and the biological basis for disorders of the mind. It was
one of the best Scientific American issues of all time. Several neuroscientists I've
spoken to have told me it played a significant role in their career choice, just as it
did for me.

The final article, "Thinking About the Brain," was written by Francis Crick, the
codiscoverer of the structure of DNA who had by then turned his talents to
studying the brain. Crick argued that in spite of a steady accumulation of detailed
knowledge about the brain, how the brain worked was still a profound mystery.
Scientists usually don't write about what they don't know, but Crick didn't care. He
was like the boy pointing to the emperor with no clothes. According to Crick,
neuroscience was a lot of data without a theory. His exact words were, "what is
conspicuously lacking is a broad framework of ideas." To me this was the British
gentleman's way of saying, "We don't have a clue how this thing works." It was
true then, and it's still true today.

Crick's words were to me a rallying call. My lifelong desire to understand brains
and build intelligent machines was brought to life. Although I was barely out of
college, I decided to change careers. I was going to study brains, not only to
understand how they worked, but to use that knowledge as a foundation for new
technologies, to build intelligent machines. It would take some time to put this
plan into action.

In the spring of 1980 I transferred to Intel's Boston office to be reunited with my
future wife, who was starting graduate school. I took a position teaching

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customers and employees how to design microprocessor-based systems. But I had
my sights on a different goal: I was trying to figure out how to work on brain
theory. The engineer in me realized that once we understood how brains worked,
we could build them, and the natural way to build artificial brains was in silicon. I
worked for the company that invented the silicon memory chip and the
microprocessor; therefore, perhaps I could interest Intel in letting me spend part
of my time thinking about intelligence and how we could design brainlike memory
chips. I wrote a letter to Intel's chairman, Gordon Moore. The letter can be distilled
to the following:

Dear Dr. Moore,

I propose that we start a research group devoted to understanding how the
brain works. It can start with one person- me- and go from there. I am
confident we can figure this out. It will be a big business one day.

- Jeff Hawkins

Moore put me in touch with Intel's chief scientist, Ted Hoff. I flew to California to
meet him and lay out my proposal for studying the brain. Hoff was famous for two
things. The first, which I was aware of, was for his work in designing the first
microprocessor. The second, which I was not aware of at the time, was for his