Blaise Agüera y Arcas: why AI really is intelligent

布莱斯·阿格雷拉·阿尔卡斯:为什么人工智能真的具有智能

Babbage from The Economist

2025-11-27

44 分钟
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Whether or not AI models really are “intelligent” is a philosophical and scientific question with profound consequences for how people use and develop the technology. But what does “intelligence” really mean? Blaise Agüera y Arcas has a provocative answer: what if intelligence—and all of life—is just a product of computation? Host: Alok Jha, The Economist's science and technology editor. Guest: Blaise Agüera y Arcas, CTO of technology & society at Google and the author of “What is Intelligence?” If you enjoyed this episode, scroll back to our two-part series, which asked: what is artificial general intelligence? Or, to learn how biology inspired the AI systems of today, find our series on the science that built the AI revolution.  Transcripts of our podcasts are available via economist.com/podcasts. Listen to what matters most, from global politics and business to science and technology—subscribe to Economist Podcasts+.
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  • In the whirlwind of conversations around artificial intelligence,

  • about what it can meaningfully do, how many jobs it might replace,

  • how much resource and energy it will need,

  • how the companies making it should be regulated, if they should be regulated at all.

  • Behind all of that,

  • there's a philosophical question that the builders of these AI models are also engaged in.

  • Are these machines really intelligent?

  • I mean really intelligent, like humans are intelligent.

  • Or perhaps a less smart animal but clearly something intelligent with memory,

  • agency and the ability to exist and adapt to its world.

  • The bosses of AI labs often talk about the fuzzy term artificial general intelligence or AGI as a kind of threshold.

  • for their models.

  • What is your definition of AGI?

  • Of course, people are arguing about that now.

  • Smarter than the smallest human being by maybe next year or something.

  • A couple of years.

  • Look, we constantly move.

  • The line of what it means to be AGI.

  • This changes everything.

  • AGI is coming tomorrow.