What is Intelligence?

By inspiring thought and conversation about how we've been shaped by the last 10,000 years and what might be in store for us over the next 10,000 years,Long Now Talksseek to expand our collective sense of the present moment.Long Now Talks are brought to you byThe Long Now Foundation, which has spent the last 25 years igniting cultural imagination around long-term thinking.Join us atlongnow.org/join

The Long Now Foundation

Blaise Agüera y Arcas’ research explores how self-reproduction — and thus life — is inherently computational.

Cowell Theater

Advance tickets for this Seminar are sold out. Please watch the live stream of this talk at www.longnow.org/live

The Long Now Foundation welcomesBlaise Agüera y Arcas<h3>What is Intelligence?</h3>Attend the <a href="https://longnow.org/talks/" title="https://longnow.org/talks/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Long Now Talks</a> in-person or via our <a href="https://www.youtube.com/longnow" title="https://www.youtube.com/longnow" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">livestream</a>Mix &amp; mingle over drinks &amp; small bites with other attendees at our pre &amp; post-show gathering in the re-imagined Cowell Theater Lobby!In What is Intelligence?, Blaise Agüera y Arcas, VP, Fellow and CTO of Technology &amp; 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 a VP and Fellow at Google, where he is the CTO of Technology &amp; 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 <a href="https://federated.withgoogle.com/" title="https://federated.withgoogle.com/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Federated Learning</a>, an approach to decentralized model training that avoids sharing private data; and founded the <a href="https://ami.withgoogle.com/" title="https://ami.withgoogle.com/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Artists + Machine Intelligence</a> 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, <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262554091/what-is-life/" title="https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262554091/what-is-life/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">What Is Life?</a> is part 1 of the larger book <a href="https://whatisintelligence.antikythera.org/" title="https://whatisintelligence.antikythera.org/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">What Is Intelligence?</a>, forthcoming from Antikythera and MIT Press in September 2025.

Our mission at <a href="http://longnow.org" title="http://longnow.org" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">The Long Now Foundation</a> is to foster long-term thinking and responsibility. Through our Long Now Talks series which began in 02003 and features speakers from around the world, we hope to ignite cultural imagination around long-term thinking. The talks are filmed live in San Francisco, and we release podcasts and videos from them which are publicly available online.

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