What is Intelligence? | Cowell Theater
Cultural Experiences
The Long Now Foundation welcomes
Blaise Agüera y Arcas
What is Intelligence?
Attend the
Long Now Talks
in-person or via our
livestream
Mix & mingle over drinks & small bites with other attendees at our pre & post-show gathering in the re-imagined Cowell Theater Lobby!
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.
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.
Our mission at
The Long Now Foundation
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.
Information Source: The Long Now Foundation | eventbrite