{"product_id":"what-is-intelligence-isbn-9780262049955","title":"What Is Intelligence?","description":"\u003cb\u003eWhat intelligence really is, and how AI’s emergence is a natural consequence of evolution.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eIncluded in the Financial Times's Best Books of 2025: Technology\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eIncluded in Bloomberg News's \"The 82 Books That Top Business Leaders Couldn’t Put Down\"\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eWhat Is Intelligence?\u003c\/i\u003e, 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe 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, \u003ci\u003eWhat Is Intelligence?\u003c\/i\u003e argues—quite against the grain—that certain modern AI systems do indeed have a claim to intelligence, consciousness, and free will.Series Foreword\u003cbr\u003ePreface\u003cbr\u003eIntroduction\u003cbr\u003e1 Origins\u003cbr\u003e2 Survival\u003cbr\u003eInterlude: The Prehistory of Computing\u003cbr\u003e3 Cybernetics\u003cbr\u003e4 Learning\u003cbr\u003e5 Other Minds\u003cbr\u003e6 Many Worlds\u003cbr\u003e7 Ourselves\u003cbr\u003e8 Transformer\u003cbr\u003e9 Generality\u003cbr\u003eInterlude: No Perfect Heroes or Villains\u003cbr\u003e10 Evolutionary Transition“Agüera y Arcas’s book is a mammoth investigation into the computational basis of life and a fascinating exploration of the nature of intelligence…the book is entertaining and thought-provoking.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e–The Financial Times \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eWhat Is Intelligence? \u003c\/i\u003eis a profound exploration of how mind, matter, and machine intervene.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e–Bloomberg News\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“If, one day, universal laws for how both AI and brains learn or think are discovered, a debt (perhaps, even, a unit name) will be owed to\u003ci\u003e What Is Intelligence?\u003c\/i\u003e”\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003cbr\u003e– Los Angeles Review of Books\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eBlaise Agüera y Arcas is a VP\/Fellow at Google, where he is the CTO of Technology \u0026amp; Society, and the founder of Paradigms of Intelligence, an organization dedicated to fundamental AI research. He is the author of \u003ci\u003eWho Are We Now?, \u003c\/i\u003eand his research has included work on privacy-preserving machine learning, on-device AI, large language models, and human identity.","brand":"The MIT Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48233841328357,"sku":"NP9780262049955","price":36.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780262049955.jpg?v=1767743851","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/what-is-intelligence-isbn-9780262049955","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}