"I do two things. I design mobile computers and I study brains"
About this Quote
A flex that lands because it’s weirdly understated: “I do two things” sounds like a tidy LinkedIn bio, then it swerves into a collision of worlds that usually don’t share a lunch table. Jeff Hawkins pairs “design mobile computers” with “study brains” as if they’re adjacent hobbies, not disciplines separated by budgets, jargon, and wildly different standards of proof. The line’s intent is boundary-breaking credibility: he’s not just a gadget guy, and he’s not merely a brain-curious technologist. He’s claiming a single through-line that makes both activities feel inevitable.
The subtext is bigger than personal branding. Hawkins is making a quiet argument about what computers are for and what they’re missing. If you build mobile computers and also study brains, you’re implying today’s machines are incomplete imitations. Mobility isn’t just a hardware constraint; it’s a hint at embodied intelligence, the way cognition evolved to move through the world, predict, adapt, and conserve energy. “Study brains” becomes a kind of R&D pipeline: neuroscience as the user manual for next-gen computation.
Context matters: Hawkins helped shape early handheld computing (Palm) while pushing theories of intelligence that resist the brute-force, scale-is-everything approach. The sentence reads like a thesis for a certain Silicon Valley archetype: the inventor who’s impatient with siloed expertise and convinced that understanding mind is the master key for building better machines. It works because it’s simple enough to be quotable, but loaded enough to be a worldview.
The subtext is bigger than personal branding. Hawkins is making a quiet argument about what computers are for and what they’re missing. If you build mobile computers and also study brains, you’re implying today’s machines are incomplete imitations. Mobility isn’t just a hardware constraint; it’s a hint at embodied intelligence, the way cognition evolved to move through the world, predict, adapt, and conserve energy. “Study brains” becomes a kind of R&D pipeline: neuroscience as the user manual for next-gen computation.
Context matters: Hawkins helped shape early handheld computing (Palm) while pushing theories of intelligence that resist the brute-force, scale-is-everything approach. The sentence reads like a thesis for a certain Silicon Valley archetype: the inventor who’s impatient with siloed expertise and convinced that understanding mind is the master key for building better machines. It works because it’s simple enough to be quotable, but loaded enough to be a worldview.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
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