Blaise Agüera y Arcas

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213 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 31 Jul

Blaise Agüera y Arcas’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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Freakonomics Radio · 682. Should A.I. Move to Space? · 24 Jul 2026 podcast

So you need to imagine those spacecraft being intelligent in their own right, not just being all controlled from the ground.

You have to imagine them being really robust and communicating with each other via light.

So laser, so-called free space optics, is a really important part of the puzzle.

You can always use radio to communicate with the swarm.

But ultimately, we're probably going to be using a combination of radio and light also for ground to space communication.

How many satellites would be working together in this form, in your vision?

Well, it's an exponential.

I can't give you a single number because if you really zoom out over the 50, 70-year timescale that I think you need to in order to understand where this will go, I know that it's a little bit tricky for me to say that because it sounds like science fiction if I talk about things that are 50 or 70 years out.

But

That's what today would have sounded like to somebody in 1945 at the dawn of the computing age.

And I think we're going to undergo a similar exponential explosion.

We're talking about near-Earth orbits in the beginning, but by the time we get toward the end of this century, I'm sure that we're going to be talking about very, very thin orbiting structures, both around the Earth and around the Sun, that require scientific notation to describe.

So really, really large numbers.

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