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Blaise Agüera y Arcas

Blaise Agüera y Arcas is an author, AI researcher and Vice President / Fellow at Google, where he is the CTO of Technology & Society and founder of Paradigms of Intelligence (Pi) – an organization working on basic research in AI and related fields, with a focus on the foundations of neural computing, active inference, sociality, evolution and Artificial Life. During his tenure at Google, Blaise has innovated on-device machine learning for Android and Pixel; invented Federated Learning, an approach to decentralized model training that avoids sharing private data; and founded the Artists + Machine Intelligence program. In 2025, Blaise was appointed to the External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, a selective group of researchers advancing complex-systems science. Blaise has authored numerous papers, essays, op-eds, and chapters, as well as three previous books, Ubi Sunt, Who Are We Now? and What Is Life?. His latest book What Is Intelligence? is available now via Antikythera and MIT Press.

Video

Functions of Consciousness

Blaise Agüera y Arcas

What if consciousness were not a mystery to be solved but a function to be traced — the same kind of thing a kidney or a wing is, definable only through what it does?

Agüera y Arcas takes up this question by way of computation: how prediction becomes modeling, how modeling of the self extends to symbiotic modeling of others, and how life, understood this way, has been computational since its origins. The inquiry does not stop at biology.

Delivered as a keynote lecture at Oxford, the talk turns the same functional test of consciousness toward contemporary AI, and asks what follows if the conditions it describes are no longer uniquely biological.