Blaise Agüera y Arcas upcoming (2025) book, What Is Intelligence?, attempts to answer the title’s question, informed by recent advances in AI, neuroscience, and artificial life.
INTRODUCTION
The accelerating convergence of biological and artificial forms of computation challenges long‑standing distinctions between life, intelligence, and machinery. Agüera y Arcas frames living systems as a “self‑modifying computational phase of matter,” arguing that higher‑order intelligence repeatedly emerges when replicators fuse into cooperative networks.
Understanding and stewarding this next phase—the merger of human and machine cognition—constitutes a central strategic task for educators, policymakers, and technologists alike.
Drawing on fresh results from artificial life simulations, high‑resolution connectomics, and frontier large‑language‑model research, the book seeks to unify biological, artificial, and theoretical perspectives into a single operational definition of intelligence. Key anticipated themes include:
• Evolution as computation: life viewed as an algorithmic explorer of design space.
• Neural motifs versus silicon circuits: substrate‑neutral principles of prediction and control.
• Symbiotic futures: policy sketches for cooperative human–AI governance.
In the mid-20th century, Alan Turing and John von Neumann developed the theoretical underpinnings of computer science, neuroscience, and AI. They also founded the field of theoretical biology, showing how living systems must necessarily be computational in order to grow, heal, and reproduce.
Recent experiments by Blaise Agüera y Arcas’ team at Google have drawn new connections between theoretical biology and computer science, showing how “digital life” can evolve in a purely random universe.
Such artificial life doesn’t evolve the way Darwinian evolutionary theory usually presumes, through random mutation and selection, but rather through symbiogenesis, wherein small replicating entities merge into progressively bigger ones.
Symbiogenesis is the leading evolutionary theory of the origin of eukaryotic cells from prokaryotic organisms. The theory holds that mitochondria, plastids such as chloroplasts, and possibly other organelles of eukaryotic cells are descended from formerly free-living prokaryotes taken one inside the other in endosymbiosis. Mitochondria appear to be phylogenetically related to Rickettsiales bacteria, while chloroplasts are thought to be related to cyanobacteria.
This may be the creative engine behind biological evolution too. In this lecture, Agüera y Arcas will describe how symbiosis explains both life’s origins and its increasing complexity. He’ll also draw connections to social intelligence theories, which suggest that similar symbioses have powered intelligence explosions in humanity’s lineage and those of other big-brained species.
Finally, he’ll argue that both modern human intelligence and AI are best understood through this symbiotic lens. Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a VP and Fellow at Google, and Google’s CTO of Technology & Society. He leads an organization working on basic research in AI, especially the foundations of neural computing, active inference, evolution, and sociality.
In his tenure at Google he has led the design of augmentative, privacy-first, and collectively beneficial applications, including on-device ML for Android phones, wearables, and the Internet of Things; and he is the inventor of Federated Learning, an approach to training neural networks in a distributed setting that avoids sharing user data.
Blaise also founded the Artists and Machine Intelligence program, and has been an active participant in cross-disciplinary dialogs about AI and ethics, fairness and bias, policy, and risk. Until 2014 he was a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft.
Outside the tech world, Blaise has worked on computational humanities projects including the digital reconstruction of Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii’s color photography at the Library of Congress, and the use of computer vision techniques to shed new light on Gutenberg’s printing technology.
Blaise has given TED talks on Seadragon and Photosynth (2007, 2012), Bing Maps (2010), and machine creativity (2016), and gave a keynote at NeurIPS on social intelligence (2019). In 2008, he was awarded MIT’s TR35 prize.
In 2018 and 2019 he taught the course “Intelligent Machinery, Identity, and Ethics” at the University of Washington, placing computing and AI in a broader historical and philosophical context. He has authored numerous papers, essays, op eds, and book chapters, as well two books: a novella, Ubi Sunt, and an interdisciplinary nonfiction work, Who Are We Now? (review by the Financial Times here).
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