Blaise Agüera y Arcas - "What Is Intelligence?"
Blaise Agüera y Arcas will discuss his new book What Is Intelligence?: Lessons from AI About Evolution, Computing, and Minds. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.
At the Co-op
About the Book: It has come as a shock to some AI researchers that a large neural net that predicts next words seems to produce a system with general intelligence. Yet this is consistent with a long-held view among some neuroscientists that the brain evolved precisely to predict the future—the “predictive brain” hypothesis.
In What Is Intelligence?, Blaise Agüera y Arcas takes up this idea—that prediction is fundamental not only to intelligence and the brain but to life itself—and explores the wide-ranging implications. These include radical new perspectives on the computational properties of living systems, the evolutionary and social origins of intelligence, the relationship between models and reality, entropy and the nature of time, the meaning of free will, the problem of consciousness, and the ethics of machine intelligence.
The book offers a unified picture of intelligence from molecules to organisms, societies, and AI, drawing from a wide array of literature in many fields, including computer science and machine learning, biology, physics, and neuroscience. It also adds recent and novel findings from the author, his research team, and colleagues. Combining technical rigor and deep up-to-the-minute knowledge about AI development, the natural sciences (especially neuroscience), and philosophical literacy, What Is Intelligence? argues—quite against the grain—that certain modern AI systems do indeed have a claim to intelligence, consciousness, and free will.
About the Author: Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a VP and Fellow at Google, where he is the CTO of Technology & Society and founder of Paradigms of Intelligence (Pi). Pi is an organization working on fundamental research in AI and related fields, especially the foundations of neural computing, active inference, sociality, evolution, and Artificial Life.
In 2008, Blaise was awarded MIT’s TR35 prize. During his tenure at Google, Blaise has innovated on-device machine learning for Android and Pixel; invented Federated Learning, an approach to decentralized model training that avoids sharing private data; and founded the Artists + Machine Intelligence program.
A frequent public speaker, he has given multiple TED talks and keynoted NeurIPS. He has also authored numerous papers, essays, op-eds, and chapters, as well as two previous books, Who Are We Now? and Ubi Sunt. His most recent book, What Is Life?, is part 1 of the larger book What Is Intelligence?, forthcoming from Antikythera and the MIT Press in September 2025.
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