Abstract:
In the mid-20th century, Alan Turing and John von Neumann developed the theoretical underpinnings of computer science, computational neuroscience, and AI. They also made seminal contributions to theoretical biology. One of these was von Neumann’s discovery that a system capable of reproduction and open-ended evolution is inherently computational. Because they are necessarily computational, living systems can then compute arbitrary functions, enabling, for example, motile bacteria to evaluate chemical gradients and swim toward food: the beginnings of intelligence. Recent experiments in Artificial Life (ALife) have for the first time shown the emergence of complex computational replicators de novo, starting only with random noise in a universe capable of computation. Intriguingly, such artificial life doesn’t evolve “classically,” powered by random mutation and selection, but through symbiogenesis, wherein smaller replicators combine to form cascades of larger ones—corresponding, from a computational perspective, to the composition of functions. The abundance of retrotransposons and other independently reproducing “endogenous viral elements” (EVEs) in eukaryotic genomes suggests that this is true of biological life too. This talk will explore these new perspectives on life, evolution, and the origins intelligence.
Biography:
Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a VP and Fellow at Google, and 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.
This talk will be British Sign Language (BSL) interpreted. A section of seats will be allocated in the best place from which to see the interpreter.
This event is free and open to all, but a ticket is required.
This will be a hybrid event (in-person and online).