21. LIFE (w/ Blaise Agüera y Arcas)

Blaise Agüera y Arcas is one of most important people in AI, and apart from his leadership position as CTO of Technology & Society at Google, he has one of those resumes or affiliations lists that seems to span a lot of very fundamental things. He’s amazing; the thoughtfulness and generosity with which he communicates on this episode gently embraced our brains while lazering them to mush. We hope you have the same experience.

References include:
• Blaise’s own books Who Are We Now?, (whoarewenow.net) Ubi Sunt (ubisunt.net), and the upcoming What Is Intelligence (whatisintelligence.antikythera.org)?
• He references James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State, which we strongly recommend, Benjamin Peters’ How Not to Network a Nation, and Red Plenty by Francis Spufford.
• Strong recommendation also to Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World.
• Roberto references Luciana Parisi’s Abstract Sex (our favorite book!) and the work of Lynn Margulis with respect to biology and reproduction.
• Blaise references James E. Lovelock’s project “Daisyworld” with respect to the Gaia hypothesis.
• He also references the Active Inference thesis, e.g. that of Karl J. Friston, and the work of Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercer on reason.
• The cellular automata work referenced here involves the Von Neumann cellular automaton and the Wolfram neural cellular automaton.
Wish us a happy 1 year anniversary of the pod!