255. Blaise Agüera y Arcas: What Is Intelligence?

About this episode

Blaise Agüera y Arcas explores the concept of intelligence and its implications in relation to AI and evolution.

What intelligence really is, and how AI's emergence is a natural consequence of evolution. 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…

People in this episode

Guest: Blaise Agüera y Arcas

Topics covered

• intelligence
• artificial intelligence
• predictive brain hypothesis
• evolution
• consciousness
• ethics of machine intelligence

Keywords

• intelligence
• AI
• evolution
• predictive brain
• consciousness
• ethics
• neuroscience
• machine learning

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Town Hall Seattle, neuroscience, computer science, machine learning, biology, physics

Books & works: What Is Intelligence?

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