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This lecture by Blaise Agüera y Arcas, VP and Fellow at Google and Google's CTO of Technology & Society, explores the intersection of computing, biology, and intelligence through the lens of symbiogenesis. Discover how Alan Turing and John von Neumann's mid-20th century work laid foundations for computer science, neuroscience, AI, and theoretical biology. Learn about recent Google experiments revealing how "digital life" can evolve in a purely random universe not through traditional Darwinian processes but through symbiogenesis—where small replicating entities merge into progressively larger ones. Explore how this symbiotic perspective explains both life's origins and increasing complexity, with connections to social intelligence theories that suggest similar symbioses have powered intelligence explosions in humans and other big-brained species. The 85-minute talk presents a compelling framework for understanding both human intelligence and AI through this symbiotic lens, delivered by an accomplished researcher who leads Google's work on neural computing, active inference, evolution, and sociality, and who invented Federated Learning for privacy-first machine learning.
