Episode 10: Blaise Agüera y Arcas on AI, Consciousness, and the Concept of Intelligence
“We often have double standards about expectations about AI and about our assumptions about people.”
In this episode of the Responsible AI podcast from The AI Forum, we speak with Blaise Agüera y Arcas, vice president and Fellow at Google and CTO of Technology & Society and founder of Paradigms of Intelligence, and author of What Is Intelligence.
Blaise and Alex discuss the profound philosophical questions that the intersection of AI and consciousness presents. They explore how AI challenges our understanding of intelligence, consciousness, and the ethical considerations that arise from these advancements.
They also explore the concept of intelligence, the historical context of AI development, the role of women in early computing, and the implications of AI's predictive capabilities. The discussion also touches on moral considerations for AI, the portrayal of AI in Hollywood, and the importance of kindness in interactions with intelligent machines.
Topics
01:32 Exploring the Concept of Intelligence
05:56 Historical Context of AI and Computing
10:57 Biology, Sex, and Intelligence
13:50 Alan Turing’s True Contribution to AI
16:15 The Brain as a Computer: A Deeper Inquiry
18:51 Understanding Consciousness and Functionalism
21:52 Hollywood's Portrayal of AI
24:50 The Power of Prediction in AI
30:03 Hallucinations in AI and Their Implications
30:50 The Evolving Role of AI in Information Retrieval
33:17 Understanding Agency in AI: Stimulus and Response
35:08 The Challenges of Long-Term Task Management in AI
37:50 AI and Moral Considerations: Should We Care?
40:15 The Apocalyptic Narrative of AI: A Balanced Perspective
42:43 The Importance of Kindness in Human-AI Interactions
49:43 Dreaming and Consciousness: What Does It Mean for AI?
About Blaise: Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a vice president 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 fundamental 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.
Blaise has given multiple TED talks and authored numerous papers, essays, op-eds, and chapters, as well as two previous books, Who Are We Now? and Ubi Sunt. His most recent book,What Is Life?, is part 1 of the larger book What Is Intelligence?, coming from Antikythera and the MIT Press in September 2025.
Learn more about Blaise here.
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