Vernor Vinge Lecture Series on the Future of AI and Society with Blaise Agüera y Arcas: AI and the Functional Role of Consciousness

About this event

Some theories of consciousness argue for the possibility of “philosophical zombies,” which may be experimentally indistinguishable from conscious entities yet lack consciousness. In this talk I will instead adopt a functional and relational perspective on consciousness, treating it not as some ineffable quality but as an evolved capability serving a purpose. Insight into that purpose has recently come from studies of multiagent machine learning, which show that without a sense of “what it is like to be oneself” (as well as the closely related capacity to know, and feel, what it might be like to be others) it’s impossible to thrive in a social environment. Hence consciousness may not be a uniquely human or even animal property, but a requirement for any intelligent social being. After exploring the relationship between this insight and the major evolutionary transitions, we will turn to the implications for AI safety and ethics.

This event is free but registration is required as space is limited. Register HERE .

Light refreshments will be served.

Blaise Agüera y Arcas is an author, AI researcher and Vice President / Fellow at Google, where he is the CTO of Technology & Society and founder of Paradigms of Intelligence (Pi), an organization working on basic research in AI and related fields, with a focus on the foundations of neural computing, active inference, sociality, evolution and Artificial Life.

During his tenure at Google, Blaise has innovated on-device machine learning for Android and Pixel; invented Federated Learning, an approach to decentralized model training that avoids sharing private data; and founded the Artists + Machine Intelligence program.

In 2025, Blaise was appointed to the External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, a selective group of researchers advancing complex-systems science.

Blaise has authored numerous papers, essays, op-eds, and chapters, as well as three previous books, Ubi Sunt , Who Are We Now? and What Is Life? His latest book What Is Intelligence? is available now via Antikythera and MIT Press.

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