Blaise Agüera y Arcas: What Is Intelligence?

What Is Life?: Evolution by Computation, and What Is Intelligence?: Lessons from AI about Evolution, Computing, and Minds, by Blaise Agüera y Arcas

Every year, there’s always one book I eagerly anticipate—the kind that, when it arrives, makes me drop everything to read. Last year, it was Sara Walker’s Life as No One Knows It—a rich yet accessible explanation of the physics of life’s emergence. The year before, it was Andreas Wagner’s Sleeping Beauties, a masterful exploration of the many innovations that lie dormant in both nature and culture.

By now, you might sense a theme: life, evolution, culture. This long journey—tracing the origins of life, evolution, adaptation, agency, decision-making, and complexity—led us to the idea of the Artificiality, where nature and technology—computation, AI, design, adoption—seem to converge. And then, a light bulb: Wait… these don’t just resemble each other—is there more than metaphor here?

This year, my most anticipated book isn’t just one—it’s a duo. What Is Life? (published March 11, 2025 in paperback) is the first part of Blaise Agüera y Arcas’s larger book What Is Intelligence? (due for publication in hardback on September 16, 2025 but available now for limited preview on Antikythera). Together, they expand on a computational and symbiotic perspective on intelligence, tracing its evolution from simple organisms to brains, societies, and AI.

By now, you might sense a theme: life, evolution, culture. The idea that nature and technology—computation, AI, design, adoption—are not just metaphorically linked but fundamentally the same has long been nascent, difficult to find amid the divisions of traditional science. It’s an insight I arrived at through years of reading and research, piecing together fragments from biology, complexity science, and computation. What makes Blaise’s perspective so remarkable is how deeply and rigorously he integrates these ideas through empirical grounding in artificial life experiments. He doesn’t just argue that life and computation are the same process. Instead he demonstrates it. For me, it made the Artificiality feel even more like a tangible reality.

So I dropped everything and started reading. And if you’re hooked on the idea that computation underlies life and intelligence, I urge you to do the same.

While countless books explore life, evolution, and biology, far fewer tackle the computational perspective in a way that’s accessible to a general reader—especially one interested in how these ideas reshape our understanding of intelligence in an AI-driven world. Blaise’s books fill this gap. What Is Intelligence? is ambitious, uniquely framed, and a design triumph, making it a joy to experience (especially online).

Here’s why: First, this is a truly audacious undertaking. Blaise weaves together the history of computation, integrates it with leading theories on the origins of life, extends it through evolution by natural selection, and then pushes into modern theories of agency—where downward causation, purposeful behavior, and even teleology in evolution challenge long-held scientific taboos. That’s a lot. Yet, he pulls it off—not just through theory, but by grounding it in his own artificial life experiments, which serve as a unifying reference point, bridging disciplines and making abstract ideas more intuitive.

It's masterfully curated and structured—just enough gets pulled in and explained from these related fields. As a reader, you're not swamped, you get just what you need. For example, in the sections on Thermodynamics and Dynamic Stability, which could easily overwhelm, he draws a clear through-line that describes in parsimonious terms how the Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates increasing disorder, yet life organizes and sustains itself—seemingly in defiance of entropy. Rather than treating life as an anomaly, he grounds his argument in artificial life experiments, showing that replication and selection drive stability, making life a dynamical attractor in computational and biological systems alike. Drawing on Addy Pross’s Dynamic Kinetic Stability, he demonstrates that life persists not by resisting entropy, but by channeling energy to maintain itself while increasing entropy elsewhere. By unifying thermodynamics with computation, he reframes life as an inevitable statistical outcome—not a mystery, but a consequence of persistence itself.

Second, the experience of the online book is, honestly, joyful. Maybe that’s a weird thing to say, but for someone who prefers reading old-school books, I was delighted by how seamlessly concepts, history, and ideas are woven together, making the whole far greater than the sum of its parts. Blaise’s artificial life experiments (which we’ve written about and recently discussed with him) spring to life—literally—on the page. Key empirical triumphs, like the sudden emergence of structure at 10⁶ iterations, aren’t just described; they’re felt, unfolding dynamically before your eyes rather than frozen in static images from a scientific paper. There’s something visceral—almost eerie—about watching bits self-organize, behaving as though they are alive, but not quite living.

Third, reading this book fills me with a deep reverence for the thinkers who came before us—the mathematicians, physicists, biologists, and engineers who uncovered the nature of computation and, in doing so, brought us to this moment where we can finally see life and computation as the same underlying process. We are, in a very real sense, computers—self-sustaining, adaptive systems shaped by the same principles that now drive artificial life. What excites me most is following Blaise’s thinking as we begin to recognize that AI may already be far more "intelligent" than we currently acknowledge—not in the ways we expected, but in ways we have yet to fully comprehend. And if that’s true, then the future of human experience, especially in the Artificiality, will be shaped not by our attempts to control intelligence, but by our ability to recognize and engage with it on its own terms.

I’m still getting the physical books, of course. If his previous book Who Are We Now? is any indication, What Is Life? and What Is Intelligence? will be just as compelling in print—an experience to savor, with their carefully curated images, rich insights, and the kind of thoughtful design that makes flipping through the pages as rewarding as exploring them online.

I can’t wait to read what’s next. With sections still to come on Cybernetics, Learning, Other Minds, and Evolutionary Transition, it’s clear that this journey is far from over. If the first chapters have already reshaped how I think about life and intelligence, I can only imagine what new insights will emerge as Blaise expands into generality, multiple worlds, and the evolving nature of ourselves.