Uploaded September 2025 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
“Life” and “intelligence” are terms with heavily contested meanings.
This discussion offers a novel, unified perspective on both, as described in Blaise Agüera y Arcas’ new book, /What Is Intelligence?: Lessons from AI About Evolution, Computing, and Minds/ (MIT Press and Antikythera, September 2025). We begin with the striking idea first put forward by John von Neumann around 1950: that general computation is at the heart of any living system.
Experiments in artificial life (ALife) have now allowed us to observe how life can emerge from randomness (abiogenesis), and suggest that “symbiogenesis” can play a central role in evolution. When computational entities enter into symbiotic relationships, they must model each other, and when they merge, “computational parallelism” enables them to become both more complex to model and more powerful as modelers.
Recent research from our group on multi-agent reinforcement learning sheds additional light on how this form of modeling results in greater cooperation, as opposed to the selfish dynamics of classical game theory. These cooperative dynamics can spark “intelligence explosions,” which are familiar to evolutionary neurobiologists who have explored the relationships between troop size and brain scaling among highly social animals.
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.
Alex Pascal (Moderator) is the Executive Director of the Berkman Klein Center.
“Life” and “intelligence” are terms with heavily contested meanings.
This discussion offers a novel, unified perspective on both, as described in Blaise Agüera y Arcas’ new book, /What Is Intelligence?: Lessons from AI About Evolution, Computing, and Minds/ (MIT Press and Antikythera, September 2025). We begin with the striking idea first put forward by John von Neumann around 1950: that general computation is at the heart of any living system.
Experiments in artificial life (ALife) have now allowed us to observe how life can emerge from randomness (abiogenesis), and suggest that “symbiogenesis” can play a central role in evolution. When computational entities enter into symbiotic relationships, they must model each other, and when they merge, “computational parallelism” enables them to become both more complex to model and more powerful as modelers.
Recent research from our group on multi-agent reinforcement learning sheds additional light on how this form of modeling results in greater cooperation, as opposed to the selfish dynamics of classical game theory. These cooperative dynamics can spark “intelligence explosions,” which are familiar to evolutionary neurobiologists who have explored the relationships between troop size and brain scaling among highly social animals.
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.
Alex Pascal (Moderator) is the Executive Director of the Berkman Klein Center.
