 I realized life is finite, and on July 16th, 2004, I decided I was going to build a brain-inspired computer. I'm an IBM Fellow, IBM Chief Scientist for Brain-Inspired Computing. The human brain has 100 trillion synapses packed into a cavity the size of a two-liter soda bottle, consuming the power of a 20-watt dim light bulb. And yet it is capable of tasks that make today's computers look like merely calculators. The true-note chip with 1 million neurons and 256 million synapses is essentially a supercomputer the size of a post-it stamp in the power of a hearing aid battery. So if you think of today's computers as fast, sequential, symbolic left brain, then you can think of true-north as pattern recognition, synthesizing, slow, sensor-actuator right brain. Brain-inspired computing will augment today's computers so that instead of us adapting to the computers, computers will adapt to us, our homes, our transportation, our work, and to our society. Imagine powerful supercomputers that can help safeguard our cities and planet so that we can make the world work better.