Talks & Lectures
What is Intelligence?
Blaise Agüera y Arcas | Long Now Foundation
A groundbreaking exploration connecting the evolutionary dots between life, computation, and symbiogenesis. Agüera y Arcas challenges essentialist views of intelligence with a functionalist perspective: biological computing through DNA, RNA, and proteins is not merely an aspect of life but its fundamental nature.
Key Themes:
- How things combine to make larger things in our symbiotic world
- The relationship between humanity and the technologies we create
- Intelligence as computation - biological and artificial
- Symbiogenesis and co-creation between humans and technology
- Moving beyond the individual to understand collective intelligence
About the Speaker:
Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a distinguished technologist and researcher exploring the nature of intelligence, consciousness, and the future of human-AI symbiosis.
Watch:
Presented September 16, 02025 at the Cowell Theater in San Francisco
Physics Just Swallowed AI
Max Tegmark | Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal
MIT physicist Max Tegmark makes the case that AI now belongs inside physics—and that consciousness will be next. A masterclass on where mind, math, and machines collide.
Key Themes:
- Intelligence (goal-achieving behavior) vs. consciousness (subjective experience)
- Falsifiable experiments using brain-reading tech and rigorous theories (IIT/φ)
- Hopfield energy landscapes make memory "feel" like physics
- Mechanistic interpretability with sparse autoencoders
- Number representations that snap into clean geometry
- Why RLHF aligns behavior but not necessarily goals
- AI progress accelerating from "underhyped" to civilization-shaping
Chapter Topics:
- Why AI is the New Frontier of Physics
- Is Consciousness Just a Byproduct of Intelligence?
- A Falsifiable Theory of Consciousness? (The MEG Helmet Experiment)
- Beyond Neural Correlates: A New Paradigm for Scientific Inquiry
- Humanity: The Masters of Underestimation (Fermi's AI Analogy)
- What Are an AI's True Goals? (The Serial Killer Problem)
- Fermat's Principle, Entropy, and the Physics of Goals
- Eureka Moment: When an AI Discovered Geometry on Its Own
- Refuting the "AI Doomers": We Have More Agency Than We Think
About the Speaker:
Max Tegmark is an MIT physicist known for his work on cosmology and his explorations of the mathematical universe hypothesis. He's the author of "Life 3.0" and a leading voice on AI safety and the future of intelligence.
Watch:
September 3, 2025 | Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal