Super fidelity requires constant investment and discipline, but great companies know how to do that.

Eventually, we need to have computers that work differently from the way they do today and have for the past 60-plus years. We're capturing and generating increasingly massive amounts of data, but we can't make computers that keep up with it. One of the most promising solutions is to make computers that work more the way brains work.

Artificial intelligence uses a complex set of rules - algorithms - to get to a conclusion. A computer has to calculate its way through all those rules, and that takes a lot of processing. So AI works best when a small computer is using it on a small problem - your car's anti-lock brakes are based on AI. Or you need to use a giant computer on a big problem - like IBM using a room-size machine to compete against humans on Jeopardy in 2011.

Babies have not yet chunked anything. They aren't doing any high level thinking. All they're doing is sucking in all the data they experience in the world around them, and remembering it, raw. It's basically what extreme savants have happen in their brains.

Every purchasing decision involves a trade-off between what I call fidelity and convenience. Fidelity is the total experience of something - how great the experience is. Convenience is how easy it is to get something. A live concert is a high fidelity way to experience music; an MP3 file is a high convenience way to experience music. Depending on the situation, one or the other is probably pretty appealing. What's not appealing is something that offers neither.

Our brains are great at knowing what to forget. We actually have to teach computers to do the same.

We learn more about how human brains work. And that leads us to ideas about how to make human brains work better.