On Intelligence, Chapter by Chapter: A 2004 Book That Predicted Half of Modern AI
A 2004 book about brains argued that intelligence is, fundamentally, prediction. Twenty-two years later, the dominant paradigm in AI is literally trained to predict the next token. That book deserves another reading.
On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins (with Sandra Blakeslee) is one of those rare technical books whose central claim has aged well in the most awkward way possible. The framework was right about what the brain does. It was almost certainly wrong about how you should engineer a machine to do it. And it is still the cleanest mental model I know for explaining why your LLM hallucinates with such confidence.
What follows is a chapter-by-chapter summary written for an engineer who is shipping AI features in 2026, not for a neuroscience seminar. I'll resist the temptation to relitigate every claim and just give you the spine, with a working engineer's annotation where the chapter has something to say about what you're building next week.
