Blaise Agüera y Arcas

What Is Intelligence?

Published by MIT Press and Antikythera

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Blaise Agüera y Arcas, author, AI researcher, and CTO of Technology & Society at Google, released his new book What Is Intelligence? via MIT Press and Antikythera.

About What Is Intelligence?
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 from the author, his research team, and colleagues. Combining technical rigor and deep up-to-the-minute knowledge about AI development, the natural sciences (especially neuroscience), and philosophical literacy, What Is Intelligence? argues—quite against the grain—that certain modern AI systems do indeed have a claim to intelligence, consciousness, and free will.

About Blaise Agüera y Arcas
Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a frequent speaker at TED and many other conferences, winner of MIT’s TR35 Prize and Fast Company’s Most Creative People award, and a Vice President and Fellow at Google Research. He leads a 500-person team working on Artificial Intelligence (AI), large language models, smart devices, technology ethics, and privacy. Publicly visible projects from his team include Federated Learning, Artists and Machine Intelligence, Coral, and many AI features in Pixel and Android. In 2016, he wrote a widely read essay on the relationship between art and technology, and in 2017 he co-authored another popular essay on physiognomy and bias in AI and a refutation of claims that facial structure reveals sexual orientation. Some of this material has been incorporated into the book’s third and fourteenth chapters. His early involvement in large language models and generative AI prompted op-eds in the Economist and essays in Noēma, as well as inspiring the novella Ubi Sunt, also published by Hat & Beard Press.