Jeff Hawkins - Numenta, software that mimics the human brain.

The future holds the truth of human consciousness firmly in it's sight. With Moore's Law on the brink of it's conclusion, around 2020, with silicon anyways, and Quantum Computing promising to help advance computer processing power well past the capabilities of the human brain, just when do you think machines will develop true consciousness?

A mister Jeff Hawkins thinks he has developed a significant step in the technological advancement of brain mimicking software. Numenta, software that implements a hierarchical temporal memory system (HTM) patterned after the human neocortex. An HTM system is not programmed in a traditional sense; instead it is trained. Sensory data is applied to the bottom of the hierarchy and the HTM system automatically discovers the underlying patterns in the sensory input. You might say it "learns" what objects are in the world and how to recognize them. Time is an essential element of how HTM systems work. First, to learn the patterns in the world, the sensory data must flow over time just as we move our eyes to see and move our hands to feel. Second, because every memory module stores sequences of patterns, HTM systems can be used to make predictions of the future. They not only discover and recognize objects but they can make predictions about how objects will behave going forward in time.