Blaise Agüera y Arcas: evaluation

Transcript context

…I've just watched your talk and you said that life and intelligence are the same thing. They are both computational. What do you mean by that? Yeah. This is a a surprising claim. I I know it I know it sounds a bit odd, but what I mean by that is well, let's let's begin with life and why life is computational. So, in the middle of the twentieth century, John von Neumann, was 1 of the founders of computer science, of course, realized that in order for a robot paddling around on a pond, let's suppose the robot is made out of LEGOs and its job is to make another robot out of loose LEGOs that it finds floating around in the pond just like itself. In order to do that, it needs to have instructions inside itself. So he imagined a tape with with instructions for how to assemble a Mii, and the the robot would also have to have a machine inside itself that would be able to walk along that tape and follow those instructions to take the loose lipos and put them together into into its own form. And it would also have to have a tape copier, so that it could endow the the offspring with with that tape, and the tape would have to include the instructions for the copier and the the assembler, the universal constructor, as he called it. So the cool thing is that he he made all of those predictions, if you like, on the basis of pure theory before Watson and Crick and their unacknowledged collaborators had figured out the structure and function of DNA, before we knew how ribosomes worked, which are in fact exactly that that universal constructor, before we had discovered DNA polymerase, which is the tape copier. And and in fact, you know, all of those things have to exist in order for for an organism to not only be able to reproduce itself, but to do so heritably, such that if you make a change in its genome and what's on the tape, then the offspring will also have that change. The kicker is that this universal constructor is a universal Turing machine. In other words, you have to have a computer inside yourself as a cell in order to make another cell, and DNA is in this very literal sense a Turing tape. So, you know, it's it's a very profound insight because, you know, basically he's saying, you cannot be a living organism without literally being a computer, a universal computer. Very interesting. So are you saying that DNA is basically a computer program? DNA is a computer program. Yes. Very cool. Because many folks in the audience would have been inspired by Conway's Game of Life, for example. And you were talking about computational equivalence.…

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