At a Harvard event, Google’s Blaise Agüera y Arcas argued that human brains and AI share computational roots, describing intelligence as fundamentally a form of computation.
Artificial intelligence may not be as separate from human intelligence as often assumed, according to Google’s Blaise Agüera y Arcas. Speaking at a Harvard Law School Berkman Klein Center event on Wednesday, the company’s CTO for technology and society argued that both human and artificial intelligence are fundamentally computational.
“Why has the computational power of brains, not just of AI models, grown explosively throughout evolution?” Agüera y Arcas asked. “If we rewind 500 million years, we see only things with very small brains, and if we go back a billion years, we see no brains at all.”
Agüera y Arcas, author of What Is Intelligence? Lessons from AI About Evolution, Computing, and Minds, said that brains function by processing information into predictions, similar to what AI systems do. “I don’t mean this metaphorically. I mean it very literally … what brains do is process information, not that they are like computers, but that they are computers,” he said.
His new book examines the evolution and social origins of intelligence, extending his argument that the computational nature of intelligence links biology, life, and machine learning.
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