Blaise Agüera y Arcas

speaker

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 · last 12 months

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

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Freakonomics Radio · 683. In the New Space Race, Who Makes the Rules? · 31 Jul 2026 podcast

And there are two things that I think are important to keep in mind about this.

One of them is

that as entities become more intelligent, more sophisticated, they spend more and more of their energy on thinking.

It's why so much of our energy of our bodies goes to our brain.

That's only true of the brainiest recently evolved species.

Fully a quarter of our energy goes into the operation of our brains.

And as cities grow and become more intelligent, meaning that they develop a larger technological base and they become capable of more things, more and more of the energy in the city goes toward thinking as opposed to manual labor.

So these are really large-scale trends that have to do with the whole evolution of intelligence on Earth.

And from that perspective, I fully expect that by the year 2100,

The great majority of energy used in the solar system will be going toward AI and will be both harvested and consumed off Earth.

So when I think about what 2100 could look like, it could look like this Earth as a beautiful biological paradise.

with lots of happy humans and animals and plants and so on, and a kind of computational mesh that extends much farther out in the solar system.

And the amount of computing happening in that mesh will dwarf what is happening on the ground, along with the amount of energy.

So that's where I see things going over the longer term, and I think that it's a continuation of a process that has already been happening for three and a half billion years.

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

I'm Blaise Aguera-Iarcas.

I am a vice president and fellow at Google and the CTO of Technology and Society.

So just this morning, I've been using AI to work on some artificial life simulations that I've been playing with.

So it's a combination of coding and paper writing.

The moment you start to have something that behaves intelligent, the question like, well, but is it really intelligent, is an interesting one to ask.

A lot of philosophers talk about this as the philosophical zombie problem.

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