Blaise Aguera y Arcas on Big Think: AI is humankind's new symbiont
blaiseaguera · x · 2026-10-20
Blaise Aguera y Arcas, who leads the Paradigms of Intelligence team, sat down with Big Think for a long-form conversation covering:
- Self-constructing computation: extending Turing and von Neumann's logic of self-replicating machines to how matter reads and executes instructions to build itself
- What defines a mind
- Why AI is humankind's new symbiont, and how we can thrive together
He notes that in his team's artificial life experiments, random code begins cooperating and self-replicating — mirroring symbiogenesis in biological evolution — making AGI part of the same evolutionary story. The interview is a full articulation of his theory connecting the origin of life to the rise of intelligence.
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