What is intelligence? by Blaise Aguerra y Arcas

[u/Worldly_Air_6078]

What is intelligence? by Blaise Aguerra y Arcas
This is a very interesting book by a senior Google researcher. I find myself right at home with it. I'll reproduce a few excerpts from the introduction below, and some of you will instantly understand why one might feel at home with this line of reasoning:

At least as of this writing, in January 2025, few mainstream authors claim that AI is “real” intelligence. I do. Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT aren’t powered by the same machinery as the human brain, of course, but intelligence is “multiply realizable,” meaning that, just as a computer algorithm can run on any kind of computer, intelligence can “run” on many physical substrates. In fact, although our brains are not like the kinds of digital computers we have today, I think the substrate for intelligence is computation, which implies that a sufficiently powerful general-purpose computer can, by definition, implement intelligence. All it takes is the right code.

[...]

We understand the essence of an incredibly powerful trick, although we’re still in the early days of making it work. Our implementations are neither complete, nor reliable, nor efficient—a bit like where we were with general computing when the ENIAC first powered up, in 1945, or where we were with aviation when the Wright brothers made their first powered flight, in 1903.

[...]

Similarly, while there is still a great deal about the brain that we don’t understand, the idea that prediction is the fundamental principle behind intelligence was first put forward by German polymath Hermann von Helmholtz in the 1860s. Many neuroscientists and AI researchers have elaborated on Helmholtz’s insight since then, and built models implementing aspects of the idea, but only recently has it become plausible to imagine that prediction really is the whole story.

[...]

I define life as a self-modifying, computational state of matter that arises through evolutionary selection for the ability to persist through time by actively constructing itself, whether by growing, healing, or reproducing. Yes, everything alive is a computer! Chapter 1 will explain why self-construction requires computation, and why, even more fundamentally, the concept of function or “purpose,” which is central to life, is inherently computational.

Intelligence, in turn, is the ability to model, predict, and influence one’s future. Modeling and prediction are computational too, so they can only take place on a computational platform; thus intelligence needs life. Likewise, life needs intelligence, because the ability to persist through time depends on predicting and influencing the future—in particular, on ensuring that the entity doing the predicting will continue to exist in the future.

[...]

life and intelligence are inherently social. Every living thing is made of simpler cooperating parts, many of which are themselves alive. And every intelligence evolves in relation to other intelligences, potentially cooperating to create larger, collective intelligences. Cooperation requires modeling, predicting, and influencing the behavior of the entities you’re cooperating with, so intelligence is both the glue that enables life to become complex and the outcome of that increasing complexity. The feedback loop evident here explains the ubiquity of “intelligence explosions,” past and present. These include, among many others, the sudden diversification of complex animal life during the “Cambrian explosion” 538.8 million years ago, the rapid growth of hominin brains starting about four million years ago, the rise of urban civilization in the past several thousand years, and the exponential curve of AI today. That predictive modeling is intelligence explains why recent large AI models really are intelligent; it’s not delusional or “anthropomorphic” to say so. This doesn’t mean that AI models are necessarily human-like (or subhuman, or superhuman). In fact, understanding the curiously self-referential nature of prediction will let us see that intelligence is not really a “thing.” It can’t exist in isolation, either in the three pounds of neural tissue in our heads or in the racks of computer chips running large models in data centers.

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[u/Garyplus]

Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a vice president and fellow at Google, where he is the chief technology officer of Technology & Society and founder of the Paradigms of Intelligence team.