DSI Distinguished Speaker Series lecture: Blaise Agüera y Arcas (Google)- A Computational View of Life and Intelligence

Abstract: “Life” and “intelligence” are terms with heavily contested meanings. This talk will present a novel perspective on both, beginning with the surprising observation, first made by von Neumann around 1950, that general computation is at the heart of any living system. Experiments in artificial life (ALife) have now allowed us to observe the emergence of life from random initial conditions (abiogenesis), in the process suggesting a central role in evolution for “symbiogenesis,” the symbiotic merger of existing replicators to form novel ones. When computational entities enter into symbiotic relationships, they must model each other, and when they merge, computational parallelism enables them to become both more complex to model and more powerful as modelers. The ensuing “intelligence explosion” feedback dynamics are familiar to evolutionary neurobiologists who have explored the relationships between troop size and brain scaling among highly social animals, including hominins. In the perspective presented here, the evolution of life, the major evolutionary transitions (including the emergence of nervous systems and brains), intelligence explosions among highly intelligent species, and even the development of advanced technologies like AI can be understood as stages in an ongoing process of computational symbiogenesis.