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 basic 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 MIT Press in September 2025.

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.

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