If its alive – its a computer!

Long Now talk by Blaise Agüera y Arcas

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhSJuqDUJME

From the blurb:

13,364 views 10 Oct 2025 Long Now Talks

Blaise Agüera y Arcas’s Long Now Talk took us on a journey through What is Intelligence?, his groundbreaking new work connecting the evolutionary dots between life, computation, and symbiogenesis.

He explores how, in our symbiotic world, things combine to make larger things all the time. We might think of humanity in terms of the individual — but we’re already part of everything we’re creating, which is in turn co-creating us.

In the story of technology and humanity, are we distinct from the technologies that we make?

Agüera y Arcas’ cuts through the essentialist dogma with a functionalist view: Biological computing — computation through DNA, RNA, and proteins — is not a strange outcropping of life but its very nature.

This talk was presented September 16, 02025 at the Cowell Theater in San Francisco. Episode notes: https://longnow.org/talks/02025-aguer… The event livestream is here:

https://www.youtube.com/live/NKxAWa7wKbU This talk is part of Long Now Talks.

 

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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, Blaise 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 + Machine Intelligence program. Prior to Google, Blaise was a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, where he worked in a variety of roles, from inventor to strategist, and led teams with strengths in experience design, pro­to­typ­ing, machine vision, augmented reality, wearable com­put­ing and mapping.

(from https://research.google/people/106776/?& )

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Some thoughts from me

There’s a hierarchy of complexity, the collective directs the the smaller parts below it in the hierarchy in accordance with its higher function.

My meditation:

What is the entity that is larger than a human being? A nation, a corporation, a psychodrama group, (see Logeman 1999)  or a couple? Those have their own systemic life and intelligence compelling the individuals in certain directions.

What about functionalism of production in society? Is there an intelligence computing the relations of production, the ownership of the means of production?

Is there a base and superstructure. There is a materiality in the relations of production that does not exist in something like geography or race.

But what does that mean for tapping into class consciousness? Will the consciousness effuse like chemicals under pressure in a tectonic plate?