What Is Intelligence?

Lessons from AI About Evolution, Computing, and Minds

On sale: September 23, 2025
Publisher: The MIT Press

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Description

What intelligence really is, and how AI’s emergence is a natural consequence of evolution.

It has come as a shock to some AI researchers that a large neural net that predicts next words seems to produce a system with general intelligence. Yet this is consistent with a long-held view among some neuroscientists that the brain evolved precisely to predict the future—the “predictive brain” hypothesis.

  • In What Is Intelligence?, Blaise Agüera y Arcas takes up this idea—that prediction is fundamental not only to intelligence and the brain but to life itself—and explores the wide-ranging implications. These include radical new perspectives on the computational properties of living systems, the evolutionary and social origins of intelligence, the relationship between models and reality, entropy and the nature of time, the meaning of free will, the problem of consciousness, and the ethics of machine intelligence.

    The book offers a unified picture of intelligence from molecules to organisms, societies, and AI, drawing from a wide array of literature in many fields, including computer science and machine learning, biology, physics, and neuroscience. It also adds recent and novel findings from the author, his research team, and colleagues. Combining technical rigor and deep up-to-the-minute knowledge about AI development, the natural sciences (especially neuroscience), and philosophical literacy, What Is Intelligence? argues—quite against the grain—that certain modern AI systems do indeed have a claim to intelligence, consciousness, and free will.

Praise for What Is Intelligence?

  • “A groundbreaking look at how AI is not just revolutionizing technology but revealing the fundamentally computational nature of intelligence and life itself. Essential reading for understanding ourselves and our future.”

    —Reid Hoffman, author of Blitzscaling; cofounder and Executive Chairman of Inflection AI; cofounder and Executive Chairman of LinkedIn

  • “Telling a good story is a gift. Telling a gripping story that draws on a deep and joyous knowledge of diverse sciences is a rare gift. Blaise is graced with that godsend, along with an unerring knack for pulling simplicity out of complexity without dumbing down. All the while, he looks very broadly at diverse cultures, the arts, and history. Our very own Renaissance man, Blaise Agüera y Arcas has given us a masterpiece.”

    —Patricia Churchland, Distinguished Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego; author of Neurophilosophy and Conscience

  • “Highly recommend this beautiful book! A fantastic synthesis to several related areas spanning artificial life, chaos, evolution, and cybernetics to modern machine learning, and how it all relates to the core fundamental question: What is intelligence?”

    —David Ha, cofounder of Sakana.ai, Japan’s leading AI company

  • “Blaise Agüera y Arcas is the guide you want to the rich, disruptive lessons that AI is teaching us about our own embodied intelligence and the space of other possible minds. This book offers a remarkable journey, written by a leading figure in the information sciences, through the labyrinth of ideas around knowledge, computation, understanding, decision-making, and agents who matter.”

    —Michael Levin, Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor at Tufts University

  • “An extraordinary tour de force—this book is an expansive, entertaining, and wonderfully provocative journey through the science and philosophy of life, intelligence, and the ever-shifting boundaries between humans and machines.”

    —Melanie Mitchell, AI authority and Professor at the Santa Fe Institute

  • “Few thinkers on technology exhibit the intellectual rigor of Blaise Agüera y Arcas. His book on intelligence is essential reading, compelling us to rethink its very essence and pushing the boundaries of our understanding of evolution.”

    —Cedric O, Former Minister of State for Digital Affairs of France; cofounder of Mistral and The Marshmallow Project

  • “What Is Intelligence? is a bold exploration of life and intelligence that transcends traditional beliefs. Agüera y Arcas illuminates our new computational companions from many directions. You will also be delighted by his insightful wit.”

    —Terrence J. Sejnowski, AI pioneer and Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies

  • “A manifesto on techno-optimism, a treatise on the material meaning of life, and a monograph on analytical engines—the universe as conceived by the big solid-state dream machine. All in a polemical book full of obscenities. What more could one want?”

    —David Krakauer, President of the Santa Fe Institute

  • “With rare brilliance, Blaise Agüera y Arcas brings together a unified and compelling wide-angle perspective on the nature of life, intelligence and consciousness. Emerging from the world of advanced AI research, this is a can’t-miss book with which modern culture will have to reckon.”

    —Carlo Rovelli, author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics