{"product_id":"what-is-life-isbn-9780262554091","title":"What Is Life?","description":"\u003cb\u003eWhat life is, and how its essence can be understood as computation that grows more complex over time in symbiotic relationships.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 1944, quantum mechanics pioneer Erwin Schrödinger wrote a slim but influential volume, \u003ci\u003eWhat Is Life?\u003c\/i\u003e, posing the primary question that rendered biology so mysterious to a physicist. How can life and all its attendant complexities come to exist in a random universe, governed by simple laws, whose disorder only increases over time?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis small book, richly illustrated and written for a general audience, offers a deep and surprising answer, drawing on decades of theory and existing literature as well as recent experiments in artificial life. Beginning with ideas developed by Alan Turing and John von Neumann in the mid-twentieth century, Agüera y Arcas shows how self-reproduction, hence life, is inherently computational. Life evolves spontaneously in environments capable of supporting computation, like our own universe, and grows more complex over time as it enters symbiotic relationships with itself.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e What Is Life?\u003c\/i\u003e is also the first part of Agüera y Arcas’s larger book \u003ci\u003eWhat Is Intelligence?\u003c\/i\u003e, which further develops a computational and symbiotic perspective on intelligence, from simple organisms to brains and societies to AI. | \u003cb\u003eTable of Contents\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAmbiogenesis\u003cbr\u003eSymbiogenesis\u003cbr\u003eReproductive functions\u003cbr\u003eLife as computation\u003cbr\u003eArtificial Life\u003cbr\u003eThermodynamics\u003cbr\u003eDynamic Stability\u003cbr\u003eCompliexification\u003cbr\u003eVirality\u003cbr\u003eCompression\u003cbr\u003eEmbodiment\u003cbr\u003eDaisyworld\u003cbr\u003eElan Vital | Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a VP\/Fellow at Google, where he is the CTO of Technology \u0026amp; Society and 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":48233841230053,"sku":"NP9780262554091","price":14.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780262554091.jpg?v=1767743851","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/what-is-life-isbn-9780262554091","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}