What is Life? with Blaise Agüera y Arcas

Join us for an evening in conversation with leading AI researcher and author Blaise Agüera y Arcas!

In 1944, quantum mechanics pioneer Erwin Schrödinger wrote a slim but influential volume, What Is Life?, posing the primary question that rendered biology so mysterious to a physicist. How can life and all its attendant complexities come to exist in a random universe, governed by simple laws, whose disorder only increases over time?

This small book, richly illustrated and written for a general audience, offers a deep and surprising answer, drawing on decades of theory and existing literature as well as recent experiments in artificial life. Beginning with ideas developed by Alan Turing and John von Neumann in the mid-twentieth century, Agüera y Arcas shows how self-reproduction, hence life, is inherently computational. Life evolves spontaneously in environments capable of supporting computation, like our own universe, and grows more complex over time as it enters symbiotic relationships with itself.

About the author

Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a VP and Fellow at Google, where he is the CTO of Technology & Society and founder of Paradigms of Intelligence (PI). PI is an organization working on basic research in AI and related fields, especially the foundations of neural computing, active inference, sociality, evolution, and Artificial Life. In 2008, Blaise was awarded MIT’s TR35 prize. During his tenure at Google, he has innovated on-device machine learning for Android and Pixel, invented Federated Learning (an approach to decentralized model training that avoids sharing private data), and founded the Artists and Machine Intelligence program. A frequent public speaker, he has given multiple TED talks and keynoted NeurIPS. He has also authored numerous papers, essays, op-eds, and chapters, as well as two previous books, Who Are We Now? and Ubi Sunt.