Foreword

Computation is a technology to think with. It is an instrument for epistemological discovery. It changes not only what we know but how we know.

Computation was discovered as much as it was invented. It is part of how the universe works, including, as Blaise Agüera y Arcas gracefully shows, what intelligence is.

Among the many rich takeaways that await you as you read What is Intelligence? is that much of what is traditionally categorized as “life,” “intelligence,” and “technology” is combining in new ways (think synthetic biology, artificial life, and AI). So too are the definitions of these terms, in ways that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago.

Are these three words—life, intelligence, technology—actually different names for the effects of a more general process? Just as life is a factory for making more life, and technology is a factory for making more technology, now life makes technologies that make new life that makes new technologies. Ultimately, it may be the same factory, and at its heart is computation.

That such a claim could be made at all is due in no small part to the creative and curious use of our computational tools—or what we might more precisely call artificial computation. With these we discover that the otherwise imperceivable building blocks of our reality and of our own flesh are themselves computational. Computation discovers itself through us.

The Antikythera book series, in collaboration with MIT Press, begins with this extraordinary book, one that asks some of the deepest questions and offers some of the most profound answers.

We are proud to launch this initiative by laying a cornerstone with the thoughts of my dear friend Blaise.

Benjamin Bratton