Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Schema representant une coupe de la moelle, avec les relations entre ses divers elements, d’apres les decouvertes modernes, 1894. Ink and pencil on paper. Courtesy photo
SFI News:
The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) will hold a community lecture “Computing, Life, and Intelligence” with Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Google, at 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, May 20, 2025.
In the mid-20th century, Alan Turing and John von Neumann developed the theoretical underpinnings of computer science, neuroscience, and AI. They also founded the field of theoretical biology, showing how living systems must necessarily be computational in order to grow, heal, and reproduce. Recent experiments by Blaise Agüera y Arcas’ team at Google have drawn new connections between theoretical biology and computer science, showing how “digital life” can evolve in a purely random universe. Such artificial life doesn’t evolve the way Darwinian evolutionary theory usually presumes, through random mutation and selection, but rather through symbiogenesis, wherein small replicating entities merge into progressively bigger ones. This may be the creative engine behind biological evolution too.
In this lecture, Agüera y Arcas will describe how symbiosis explains both life’s origins and its increasing complexity. He’ll also draw connections to social intelligence theories, which suggest that similar symbioses have powered intelligence explosions in humanity’s lineage and those of other big-brained species. Finally, he’ll argue that both modern human intelligence and AI are best understood through this symbiotic lens.
Agüera y Arcas will be signing copies of his book, What is Life: Evolution as Computation, in the Lensic Lobby in advance of this lecture, starting at 6:30 p.m.
Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a VP and Fellow at Google, and Google’s CTO of Technology & Society. He leads a team working on basic research in AI, especially the foundations of neural computing, active inference, evolution, and sociality. He is the inventor of federated learning, an approach to training neural networks in a distributed setting that avoids sharing user data. Blaise also founded Google’s Artists and Machine Intelligence program, and has been an active participant in cross-disciplinary dialogues about AI and ethics, fairness and bias, policy, and risk.
Reserve your free tickets through The Lensic Box Office online or call 505.988.1234. Santa Fe residents are encouraged to attend in person. This lecture will be streaming from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and our YouTube page.
This lecture is presented at no cost to the public thanks to generous sponsorship from the McKinnon Family Foundation with additional support provided by The Lensic Performing Arts Center and the Santa Fe Reporter.
Click here for more information about SFI’s Community Lecture Series.