Keynote Speaker: Blaise Agüera y Arcas, CTO of Technology & Society, Google
Talk Title: Evolution, Intelligence, and Symbiosis
Abstract:
This talk will combine studies of abiogenesis (the transition from non-life to life), the “predictive brain” or active inference model of intelligence, and the concept of multiscale symbiotic prediction. I will argue that life and intelligence can be understood within this common framework, and that symbiotic cooperation is the key to scaling complexity and building more capable AI systems.
Bio:
Blaise Agüera y Arcas is Google’s CTO of Technology & Society. He leads an organization working on basic research in AI, especially the foundations of neural computing, active inference, evolution, and sociality. In his tenure at Google he has led the design of augmentative, privacy-first, and collectively beneficial applications and 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 the Artists and Machine Intelligence program, and has been an active participant in cross-disciplinary dialogs about AI and ethics, fairness and bias, policy, and risk. Until 2014 he was a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft. Outside the tech world, Blaise has worked on computational humanities projects including the digital reconstruction of Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii’s color photography at the Library of Congress, and the use of computer vision techniques to shed new light on Gutenberg’s printing technology. In 2018 and 2019 he taught the course “Intelligent Machinery, Identity, and Ethics” at the University of Washington, placing computing and AI in a broader historical and philosophical context. He has authored numerous papers, essays, op eds, and book chapters, as well two books: a novella, Ubi Sunt, and an interdisciplinary nonfiction work, Who Are We Now?. His upcoming book, What Is Intelligence?, will be published by MIT Press in 2025.