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Evolution "Doesn't Need" Mutation - Blaise Agüera y Arcas
16 Feb 2026 13 published claims 1 attributable person
Speakers in the public record
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evaluation 7prediction 3uncertainty 1belief 1commitment 1
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The useful parts, with receipts.
13 published records
“You have to build higher order models of them because that becomes an essential part of your umwelt, and you have to simplify or coarse grain the world in order to build a model that is that is ecologically relevant to you.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“There were no I don't know if there were Legos in 1950, but let's pretend there were Legos in 1950.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“I think in the real biology, we maintain those hierarchical structures and that there are fundamental mathematical differences, how how you treat those embryos.”
- Speaker
- Not verified from transcript
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“Things like intelligence explosions in our lineage in the hominins and in cetaceans, and in bats and in a variety of other species are exactly this kind of runaway modeling of others resulting in, growth of brains and growth of of groups and and therefore that, you know, when we think about the growth of advanced intelligence, you know, in in in, you know, human societies or human brains, it's it's really that same sort of of symbiotic process happening at a much at a much higher level.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“I didn't mention, but, you know, in the original version of BFF, I added some random mutation because, you know, we're all taught in school that the way the way evolution works is chance and necessity.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“So, you know, on top you have logical gates, on the bottom you have, you know, transistors in your computer. This is important because, you know, there's there are no bits in a computer, there are just voltages that go up and down.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“When that happens, then they'll start to copy as a group and that is a symbiogenetic event. So basically, the reason that even without mutation you get these complex programs arising is because of these fusion events between smaller replicators.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“In the nineteenth century, when we began to figure out organic chemistry and be able to synthesize urea and so on, the the idea that that no, we should really adopt a strictly materialist perspective because there's nothing special or different about the matter in us versus the matter anywhere else in the universe, took hold.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“I think that the origin of matter and the origin of life might actually be 1 and the same thing and evolution might actually be the answer to that question but it's an evolution that includes a term that Darwin did not account for in his original formulation.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“Sometimes you can see the 2 of those populations go up and down together, that so means that they they may be collaborating with each other, and sometimes they go in opposite directions, they're anti correlated, and that means that they're competing with each other because they're, you know, 1 is overwriting the other for instance.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“I agree. So I made claims that maybe sound contradictory, you know, 1 of which was that Von Neumann is embodied computation and different from Turing in that sense, but on the other hand that BFF looks like, you know, very much like a Turing machine, and yet I also said it was embodied because I made 1 tape.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“You know, they might simplify, they might get more complex, it doesn't matter. But with symbiogenesis, we know that things get more complex because if a can replicate itself and and survive into the future and b can replicate itself and survive into the future, when they come together, you suddenly need a to replicate itself and b to replicate itself and there's some additional information that has been added, which is how the 2 fit together.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“Right? So if you have a purely physical system, then, you know, to say that a causes b is equivalent to saying that b causes because everything is kind of a block universe, you like, in that kind of setup.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk