He reminds me of myself back when I was an academic. I had a glorious capacity to genuinely believe that whatever I was working on was extremely important, and

He reminds me of myself back when I was an academic. I had a glorious capacity to genuinely believe that whatever I was working on was extremely important, and the hidebound fools in the establishment failed to appreciate my work because of a combination of inertia, stupidity, and possibly corruption. When I got some distance from it realized that my ideas were just moderately interesting and only barely novel, and the implications weren't as big as I wanted them to be. The greatest indication that Hawkins is directionally right but also substantially wrong is the fact that GPT-3, AlphaZero, etc. are capable of such amazing things with such a uniform architecture, that nonetheless don't really look the way he thinks they should. Personally, I think he underestimates the degree to which huge classes of machine learning algorithms are basically just different ways of instantiating the same concepts.