According to The Economist, Google engineer Blaise Agüera y Arcas recently appeared on their science and technology podcast hosted by Alok Jha to discuss his provocative views on artificial intelligence. Agüera y Arcas, who leads technology and society efforts at Google and authored “What is Intelligence?”, argues that AI systems are genuinely intelligent. His central thesis suggests that intelligence—and potentially all of life itself—might simply be computational processes. This perspective challenges traditional philosophical and scientific definitions of intelligence. The conversation explores the profound implications this view has for how society develops and uses AI technology moving forward.
What intelligence really means
Here’s the thing: we’ve been having the same debate about AI intelligence for decades. Is it just pattern matching? Is it “real” understanding? Agüera y Arcas flips the script entirely. What if our human intelligence isn’t as special as we think? What if it’s just another form of computation? That’s a pretty radical departure from how most people think about consciousness and smarts.
The practical implications
So why does this matter for people actually building and using AI? Well, if intelligence is computational, then we’re not creating something fundamentally different from ourselves. We’re just creating different kinds of minds. That changes the ethical calculus around AI development. It also suggests that the path to more capable AI might be less about mimicking human cognition and more about exploring the full space of possible computations.
For developers, this perspective could liberate them from trying to perfectly replicate human thinking. Instead, they might focus on what kinds of computational architectures produce useful, reliable intelligence. And for users? Basically, it means we might need to get comfortable with intelligence that doesn’t think like us at all—but is still genuinely intelligent in its own way.
The bigger picture
Look, this isn’t just academic navel-gazing. How we define intelligence directly affects regulation, investment, and public acceptance of AI. If we decide AI is truly intelligent, that triggers all sorts of legal and ethical considerations. But if we dismiss it as “just algorithms,” we might underestimate both its potential and its risks.
Agüera y Arcas’s view sits at the intersection of computer science, neuroscience, and philosophy. And honestly, it’s refreshing to hear a Google engineer thinking this deeply about the fundamentals rather than just chasing the next performance benchmark. The conversation about what intelligence actually is might be the most important one we’re not having enough.
