Jeff Hawkins was a pioneer on the Palm Pilot, a device I have a fondness for, one of the first "smart" devices to handle sync'd contacts, apps and calendars. Until Palm was crushed in the phone wars, Palm was the undisputed leader in this category.
Jeff Hawkins killer app was the Graffiti software that translated stylus writing on the Palm touch screen into computer-recognized text. The big innovation was the alteration of a few block-letters to make the printing simple and clear enough for the communication to work effectively. His insight was that the "computers should learn" philosophy was not perfect, and a more "learn together" concept would be a much faster solution to human-computer communication.
"On Intelligence" was Hawkins' attempt to re-define the "thinking computer" question using neurobiology. Not a bad task, but I found the book relatively boring and difficult to listen to.
What I did like was the idea that the brain is primarily a relationship identification system, quite different than the linear types of information processing being deigned for computer intelligence. This idea has merit, and helps explain (and Hawkins does a good job of doing so) how different brain areas can learn, or process, information in similar ways (e.g. reading, language, hearing all seem to access the same symbolic representations, regardless of the physical modality of the input). Compare this to computers, where the modality is key at this point in technological history.
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