lukeprog,

I remember readng Jeff Hawkins' On Intelligence 10 or 12 years ago, and found his version of the "one learning algorithm" extremely intriguing. I remember thinking at the time how elegant it was, and the multiple fronts on which it conferred explanatory power. I see why Kurzweil and others like it too.

I find myself, ever since reading Jeff's book (and hearing some of talks later) sometimes musing -- as I go through my day, noting the patterns in my expectations and my interpretations of the day's events -- about his memory - prediciton model. Introspectively, it resonates so well with the observed degrees of fit, priming, pruning to a subtree of possibility space, as the day unfolds, that it becomes kind of automatic thinking.

In other words, the idea was so intuitively compelling when I heard it that it has "snuck-in" and actually become part of my "folk psychology", along with concepts like cognitive dissonance, the "subconscious", and other ideas that just automatically float around in the internal chatter (even if not all of them are equally well verified concepts.)

I think Jeff's idea has a lot to be said for it. (I'm calling it Jeff's, but I think I've heard it said, since then, that someone else independently, earlier, may have had a similar idea. Maybe that is why you didn't mention it as Jeff's yourself, but by its conceptual description.) It's one of the more interesting ideas we have to work with, in any case.