In the first pages of his book What is Intelligence? Blaise Agüera y Arcas makes a perhaps unexpected claim: “everything alive is a computer.” By that, of course, Agüera y Arcas, a computer scientist with a deep interest in the foundations of intelligence, does not mean that all living things are secretly digital computers. Instead, he means that the core processes that allow for biological life on this planet, the tightly-wound processes of replication and evolution, are computational processes. Biological computing — computation through DNA, RNA, and proteins — is not a strange outcropping of life but its very nature. And in that connection, deep in the nature of life and computing, we can find an answer to the question that the title of Agüera y Arcas' book raises.

Agüera y Arcas takes a “functionalist” view of intelligence, finding that intelligence is not something tied to any particular arrangement or material composition but instead “multiply realizable,” a phenomenon that can be achieved by biological life, yes, but also by other forms — say, sufficiently potent digital computers. To Agüera y Arcas, the key to determining whether some system is intelligent is in its behavior — and, in particular, its behavior in the context of external stimuli. Intelligence, then, is fundamentally social and responsive, tied up in questions of prediction and response originally posed by pioneering physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz in the nineteenth century. Agüera y Arcas draws on Helmholtz's notion of intelligence and perception from “unconscious inferences,” small moments of adjustment and calibration in response to ever-changing external conditions observable even in simple, unicellular biological computers and surprisingly light-weight artificial intelligence models.

About Blaise Agüera y Arcas

Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a vice president and fellow at Google, where he is the chief technology officer of Technology & Society and founder of the Paradigms of Intelligence team, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. His book What Is Intelligence? will be released in September by Antikythera and MIT Press. His work explores the foundations of neural computing, active inference, evolution, and sociality. His work as a writer, researcher, and technologist has for the past two decades been focused on connecting the cutting edge of digital computing technology with the broader historical, philosophical, and biological worlds, placing machine intelligence in conversation with topics as disparate as Gutenberg's printing press, the history of color photography, and the history of life on our planet.

Why This Talk Matters Now

These debates on the fundamental nature of intelligence and life perhaps seemed like purely academic discussions only a few years ago; always important, but never pressing. Now, the rise of increasingly powerful artificial intelligences, especially large language models, has made these debates into live issues — not just to be argued about between philosophers of mind and biologists but to be explored by technologists and laypeople around the world. Agüera y Arcas' functionalist view cuts through the semantic haze and essentialist dogma that so often accompanies discussions on heady themes like intelligence, life, and computation and instead focuses on a certain twist on cyberneticist Stafford Beer's maxim: “The purpose of a system is what it does.”

The Long View

Even before Long Now's founding, our community has been engrossed in the questions of biological intelligence and its mirror in digital computation. Long Now cofounder Danny Hillis has, through his work in computer science, probed these questions for decades. In 01989, he wrote about “Intelligence as an Emergent Behavior,” an essay in Daedalus drawing on both Hillis' own efforts to create thinking machines and the history of human evolution.  In 01992, Long Now board member Kevin Kelly wrote Out of Control, which took a wide-ranging approach to connect the social, biological, and computational worlds.

Blaise Agüera y Arcas' What is Intelligence? is part of the Antikythera Book Series, published by MIT Press in collaboration with the Antikythera Program at the Berggruen Institute. Long Now has previously hosted a Long Now Talk from Benjamin Bratton, Director of Antikythera, on A Philosophy of Planetary Computation, as well as a Long Now Talk with astrobiologist and theoretical physicist Sara Imari Walker on an Informational Theory of Life, that explored parallel ideas in biology and computation.

Learn More

Read Life, Intelligence, and Consciousness: A Functional Perspective, an essay for Long Now Ideas.

Read AI Is Evolving — And Changing Our Understanding Of Intelligence, an essay for Noema.

Watch Rethinking Minds in the Age of AI, a 02025 TedX Talk.

Read What is Intelligence? , presented in its entirety on Antikythera.