“Life” and “intelligence” are terms with h eavily contested meanings.
This discussion will offer a novel\, unifi ed perspective on both\, as described in Blaise Agüera y Arcas’ new book\, What Is Intelligence?: Lessons from AI About Evolution\, Computing\, and Mi nds (MIT Press and Antikythera\, September 2025). We begin with the strikin g idea first put forward by John von Neumann around 1950: that general comp utation is at the heart of any living system.
Experiments in artifici al life (ALife) have now allowed us to observe how life can emerge from ran domness (abiogenesis)\, and suggest that “symbiogenesis” can play a central role in evolution. When computational entities enter into symbiotic relati onships\, they must model each other\, and when they merge\, “computational parallelism” enables them to become both more complex to model and more po werful as modelers.
Recent research from our group on multi-agent rei nforcement learning sheds additional light on how this form of modeling res ults in greater cooperation\, as opposed to the selfish dynamics of classic al game theory. These cooperative dynamics can spark “intelligence explosio ns\,” which are familiar to evolutionary neurobiologists who have explored the relationships between troop size and brain scaling among highly social animals.
Join us to learn how the evolution of life\, the major evolu tionary 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: computational symbiogenesis.
In this i nteractive event\, your input will be essential to our conversation\, so ph ones are encouraged!
CATEGORIES:Book Talk ORGANIZER;CN="Jessica Weaver":MAILTO:jweaver@law.harvard.edu URL;VALUE=URI:https://hls.harvard.edu/events/what-is-intelligence/ ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://hls.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/BArcas_16x9-2.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/New_York BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 DTSTART:20250309T070000 TZNAME:EDT END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR