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The machines were supposed to come from somewhere else as invaders. An alien intelligence, hellbent robots, a rival species. But nothing’s arrived. Instead, the machines came out of us, the same way our cells emerged from bacteria that learned to live together. Evolution builds new life by combining old life, and it doesn’t stop with biology.
In this episode, Blaise Agüera y Arcas makes the case to physicist Carlo Rovelli that artificial general intelligence has already arrived. But we moved the goalposts rather than admit it. Arcas is the Chief Technology Officer of Technology & Society at Google Research. He traces intelligence back to its original use case – modeling others, cooperating with them, surviving together. The same force now entwines us with our technology. Ten billion people can't live without them. They can't exist without us. The merger isn't coming. It's how we got here.
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Mentioned in this Episode:
What Is Life?: Evolution as Computation — Blaise Agüera y Arcas (Book, 2025)
Do Large Language Models Understand Us? — Blaise Agüera y Arcas (Article, 2022)
Artificial General Intelligence Is Already Here — Blaise Agüera y Arcas and Peter Norvig (Article, 2023)
Computational Life: How Well-formed, Self-replicating Programs Emerge from Simple Interaction — Blaise Agüera y Arcas et al. (Paper, 2024)
What Is Life? — Erwin Schrödinger (Book, 1944)
What Is It Like to Be a Bat? — Thomas Nagel (Article, 1974)
The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves — W. Brian Arthur (Book, 2009)
Where to Find Blaise Agüera y Arcas:
Website: https://www.blaiseaguera.com/
Paradigms of Intelligence, Google: https://github.com/paradigms-of-intelligence
Instagram: @blaiseaguera
Bluesky: @blaiseaguera.bsky.social
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futurology@berggruen.org
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Credits
Executive Producers: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Nils Gilman, Dawn Nakagawa, & Jason Hoch
Producers: Grant Slater, Alex Gardels, & Nathalia Ramos
Associate Producer: Elissa Mardiney
Theme Music: Marcus Bagala
Audio Engineer: Aaron Bastinelli & Kyle Scott Wilson
Futurology is a production of Studio B and Wavland for the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles, California.
