Acknowledgments
2024, the year I spent writing this book, has been a year of losses. Two hit especially close to home. My father, Josep Agüera i Arcas, passed away in the Spring. He bought me my first computer, a Texas Instruments 99/4A, in 1981. I was six years old, and our family was living in a small apartment in Mexico City. He brought it back with him from a visit to the United States, certain that computers were about to change the world. In this, and in much else, he turned out to be right. He shaped many aspects of my childhood—from a steady diet of sci-fi, to unsanctioned after-hours field trips to the General Hospital where he was a medical resident, to the many electronic devices we took apart together, to the small mammal dissections we conducted with great ceremony on the kitchen table. (My mother left the house for those.) He was a complex, flawed person. He was also always a loving father, and his unshakeable belief that I would lead an interesting life was a self-fulfilling prediction.
Just a week before he died, we also lost a dear family friend, Lesley Hazelton. Lesley was a brilliant writer, a razor-sharp critic, an inspiration to her many friends, and a rebel to the end. She lived, and died, exactly as she wished. A few years ago she encouraged me to begin writing for real, and was generous—and unstinting—in her feedback. I miss her. We all do.
What Is Intelligence? owes its existence to a great many people and several institutions—especially Google, Antikythera, the University of Washington, the Berggruen Institute, the Santa Fe Institute, the Mila-Quebec AI Institute, and MIT Press. Many of the people I’ll thank below are affiliated with one or more of these.
As a designed object, this book’s co-creator is James Goggin of Practise, in Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland). What Is Intelligence? further develops an approach to simultaneously physical and digitally native media we established with our first two projects, Ubi Sunt and Who Are We Now? (both published by Hat & Beard Press, with warm thanks to J. C. Gabel). Chapter 1, Origins, first appeared in a limited print edition, What Is Life?, in the fall of 2024, when we began the online serialization. What Is Life? is now also available from MIT Press.
Clea Agüera-Arcas, Loraine Agüera-Arcas, and Johan Michalove have helped research, edited painstakingly, offered line-by-line critique, chased down sources and permissions, coded workflows, wrangled spreadsheets, and in short dedicated an immense effort over more than a year to making the book as accurate and readable as we could. Adrienne Fairhall provided extensive feedback, especially on the neuroscience, which greatly improved both my core arguments and their exposition. Brian Sholis did the final rounds of editing and proofreading. However, I take sole responsibility for any remaining errors or omissions, and all perspectives, interpretations, and opinions, mistaken or not, are my own.
In collaboration with James Goggin, Minkyoung Kim and Marie Otsuka designed and implemented the web version, which includes a good deal of video and interactive content. The simulations owe a heavy debt to Alex Mordvintsev (also the inventor of neural cellular automata) and his elegant SwissGL library.
Additional close readings of the text and editorial input, which improved the final result significantly, came from Benjamin Bratton, Stephanie Sherman, David LeBrun, Ben Laurie, Rif A. Saurous, Kate Meyer, Gary Lupyan, Moritz Firsching, Alexander Meulemans, and Emily French. Warm thanks also to Anselm Agüera y Arcas, Eliot Agüera y Arcas, Patricia Churchland, George Dyson, Walter Fontana, N. Katherine Hayles, Reid Hoffman, DeLesley Hutchins, Michael Levin, Johan Liedgren, David Michalove, Charles Mudede, Addy Pross, Carl Schoonover, Terry Sejnowski, Justin Smith-Ruiu, Dan Sperber, Korina Stark, John Thornhill, Sara Imari Walker, Ren Weschler, Olaf Witkowski, and David Wolpert.
In 2018 and 2019, I taught an interdisciplinary course at the University of Washington, Intelligent Machinery, Identity, and Ethics, with help from Adrienne Fairhall and enthusiastic support from Dan Grossman, Vice Director of the Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering. Dan introduced me to Johan Michalove, suggesting that he would be the perfect TA—which he was. Teaching is the best way of learning. Although AI has developed a great deal in the years since, the course was an early draft of many ideas in this book, and those ideas further benefited from long after-lecture discussions with my students.
At Google, I owe deep thanks to James Manyika and Sundar Pichai for giving my team, Paradigms of Intelligence (Pi), the freedom and resources to pursue interdisciplinary basic research. I’m grateful to Demis Hassabis and Yossi Matias for their support of internal collaboration with Google DeepMind and Google Research, respectively, and to Yul Kwon for his deft co-leadership of Pi. A big thank you to Pi teammates and collaborators: Jyrki Alakuijala, Kenric Allado-McDowell, Travis Beals, Sami Boukortt, Martin Bruse, Iulia Comșa, Yiğit Demirag, Moritz Firsching, Thomas Fischbacher, Alice Guan, Florian Hartmann, Geoff Keeling, Evgenii Kliuchnikov, Seijin Kobayashi, Marcin Kowalczyk, Rachelle Lacroix, Mira Lane, Alison Lentz, Brittni Maekawa, Kaitlin Maile, Delaney McMillen, Alexander Meulemans, Alex Mordvintsev, Eyvind Niklasson, Peter Norvig, Robert Obryk, Ettore Randazzo, Esteban Real, João Sacramento, Mark Sandler, Nino Scherrer, Anoop Sinha, Oliver Siy, Winnie Street, Zoltan Szabadka, Luca Versari, Sarah de Haas, and Johannes von Oswald. Visiting faculty James Evans, Guillaume Lajoie, and Blake Richards have been wonderful friends and colleagues, and have all made intellectual contributions to the material presented here.
Time spent at the Santa Fe Institute over the past two years has profoundly influenced my perspective on life, complexity, and intelligence. I have also engaged with a number of new collaborators, fellow travelers, and constructive critics (often a bit of each) there, including Kevin Berger, Sean Carroll, David Chalmers, Ted Chiang, Michael Hersch, Chris Kempes, David Krakauer, John Krakauer, Gary Lupyan, Brice Ménard, Melanie Mitchell, Carlo Rovelli, Zenna Tavares, Geoffrey West, and David Wolpert. I also re-encountered the wonderful Dan Dennett and met Susan Bell at SFI. Very sadly, Dan was also one of 2024’s losses; he is much missed.
What Is Intelligence? is among the first long-form publications of the Antikythera program, under the direction of Benjamin Bratton. Benjamin has instigated many of my major writing projects in recent years, including this one, and has been a loyal friend and frequent collaborator. Warm thanks also to Haley Albert, Nicolay Boyadjiev, Nils Gilman, Emily Knapp, Dawn Nakagawa, Estela Oliva, Tobias Rees, and Claire Webb; my gratitude, also, to Nicolas Berggruen for his intellectual friendship and support, and to the Berggruen Institute.
Finally, warm thanks to Noah Springer of MIT Press, for believing in this project and for helping us bend the rules of traditional academic publishing.