Blaise Agüera y Arcas

In What is Intelligence?, Blaise Agüera y Arcas, VP, Fellow and CTO of Technology & Society at Google, explores what intelligence really is, and how AI’s emergence is a natural consequence of evolution. Encompassing decades of theory, existing literature, and recent artificial life experiments, Agüera y Arcas’ research argues that certain modern AI systems do indeed have a claim to intelligence, consciousness, and free will.

This talk is presented as part of a larger project on What is Intelligence?, including a printed book alongside experimental formats which challenge the conventions of academic publishing. It is the inaugural collaborative work of Antikythera, a think tank on the philosophy of technology, and MIT Press, a leading publisher of books and journals at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design.

Blaise Agüera y Arcas is an author, AI researcher and Vice President / Fellow at Google, where he is the CTO of Technology & Society and founder of Paradigms of Intelligence (Pi) – an organization working on basic research in AI and related fields, with a focus on the foundations of neural computing, active inference, sociality, evolution and Artificial Life.

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.