Julien Crockett at the Los Angeles Review of Books:
“At least as of this writing,” Blaise Agüera y Arcas begins his new book What Is Intelligence? Lessons from AI About Evolution, Computing, and Minds, “few mainstream authors claim that AI is ‘real’ intelligence. I do.” Gauntlet thrown, Agüera y Arcas lays out his thesis, which is simple—in the way that profound remarks or universal theories can be—yet with enormous implications: because the substrate for intelligence is computation, all it takes to create intelligence is the “right” code.
What Is Intelligence? is a wide-ranging defense of this argument. Agüera y Arcas takes us from the emergence of life to Paradigms of Intelligence, his research group at Google, where he studies biologically inspired approaches to computation. Importantly, given the rapid development and deployment of AI today, What Is Intelligence? makes us question what is so “artificial” about artificial intelligence.
In our conversation, we discuss definitions of life and intelligence, cultural attitudes toward AI, whether we should have been surprised by the success of large language models in the early 2020s, and the implications of AI on society.
More here.
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