{"id":264672,"date":"2025-09-29T20:14:14","date_gmt":"2025-09-29T20:14:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/264672\/"},"modified":"2025-09-29T20:14:14","modified_gmt":"2025-09-29T20:14:14","slug":"artificial-intelligence-may-not-be-artificial-harvard-gazette","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/264672\/","title":{"rendered":"Artificial intelligence may not be artificial \u2014 Harvard Gazette"},"content":{"rendered":"

The term artificial intelligence renders the sense that what computers do is either inferior to or at least apart from human intelligence. AI researcher Blaise Ag\u00fcera y Arcas<\/a> argues that may not be the case.<\/p>\n

\"What<\/p>\n

Ag\u00fcera y Arcas, Google\u2019s CTO of technology and society, traced the evolution of both human and artificial intelligence in ways that seem to mirror each other as part of a Wednesday event sponsored by Harvard Law School\u2019s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society<\/a>. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy has the computational power of brains, not just of AI models, grown explosively throughout evolution?\u201d said Ag\u00fcera y Arcas, the author of the new book \u201cWhat Is Intelligence? Lessons from AI About Evolution, Computing, and Minds.\u201d \u201cIf we rewind 500 million years, we see only things with very small brains, and if we go back a billion years, we see no brains at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Ag\u00fcera y Arcas, human brains evolved to be computational, meaning that they process information by transforming various kinds of inputs into signals or outputs, and that most of the computation that brains do takes the form of predictions, which is what AI systems do.<\/p>\n

\u201cI hear a lot of people say that it\u2019s a metaphor to talk about brains as computers,\u201d said Ag\u00fcera y Arcas. \u201cI don\u2019t mean this metaphorically. I mean it very literally \u2026 The premise of computational neuroscience is that what brains do is process information, not that they are like computers, but that they are computers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ag\u00fcera y Arcas\u2019 book explores the evolution and social origins of intelligence and develops his insights on what he calls the computational nature of intelligence, biology, and life as a whole.<\/p>\n

It draws on ideas from scientists such as Alan Turing and John von Neumann and their theories on self-replication and universal computation, as well as evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis\u2019 theory of symbiogenesis and Ag\u00fcera y Arcas\u2019 own research and experiments at Google.<\/p>\n

Ag\u00fcera y Arcas used Margulis\u2019 theory, which suggests that merging different organisms to form more complex entities played a key role in cell evolution, to explain the similarities between the computational aspects of both biology and AI models, which also engage in symbiotic relationships of cooperation and develop greater complexity and intelligence.<\/p>\n

Charles Darwin\u2019s evolution theory of random mutation and natural selection is only half the evolution story, Ag\u00fcera y Arcas said; symbiogenesis, with cooperation as its main feature, is the creative engine behind evolution.<\/p>\n

\u201cLife was computational from the start,\u201d said Ag\u00fcera y Arcas. \u201cIt gets more computationally complex over time through symbiogenesis because when you have two computers that come together and start cooperating, now you have a parallel computer, and a massively parallel computation that leads to more and more parallel computation, which is exactly what we see in nervous systems that consist of lots of neurons that are all computing functions in parallel.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cLife was computational from the start.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ag\u00fcera y Arcas<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

During his talk, Ag\u00fcera y Arcas showed the audience a video of experiments he conducted at Google using a programming language to explore the development of complex programs from simple, random initial conditions.<\/p>\n

The root programming language used only eight basic instructions, but after a few million interactions among the random bytes more complex programs began to appear because they became self-reproducing \u2014 and grew in complexity.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was an exploration of how self-reproducing entities can arise out of random initial conditions, which is how life must have arisen, right?\u201d said Ag\u00fcera y Arcas. \u201cWe know that life didn\u2019t always exist in the universe. \u2026 There must have been initial conditions that are disordered from which life arises.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ag\u00fcera y Arcas views intelligence as the ability to predict and influence the future and traces the \u201chuman intelligence explosion\u201d to the moment when humans formed societies and began cooperating and living together. He argues the growth and evolution of human brains began when they banded together and created collective societies.<\/p>\n

The emergence of societies was a major evolutionary transition, he said, citing the work<\/a> of scientists E\u00f6rs Szathm\u00e1ry and John Maynard Smith.<\/p>\n

\u201cHuman individuals are not very smart, but when we get together, we can do amazing things, like transplanting organs and going to the moon,\u201d said Ag\u00fcera y Arcas. \u201cThose are not individual capabilities. No individual human can do that. That\u2019s a collective human intelligence sort of thing, and it comes about through specialization, through theory of mind, through us being able to model each other in order to work in groups.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The term artificial intelligence renders the sense that what computers do is either inferior to or at least…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":264673,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[30038,691,738,13978,158,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-264672","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-a-i","9":"tag-ai","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-book","12":"tag-technology","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115289422161375142","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264672"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264672\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/264673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}