What intelligence really is and how AI’s emergence is a natural consequence of evolution.
Included in the Financial Times's Best Books of 2025: Technology Included in Bloomberg
News's "The 82 Books That Top Business Leaders Couldn’t Put Down" It has come as a shock to
some AI researchers that a large neural net that predicts next words seems to produce a system
with general intelligence. Yet this is consistent with a long-held view among some
neuroscientists that the brain evolved precisely to predict the future—the “predictive brain”
hypothesis. In What Is Intelligence? Blaise Agüera y Arcas takes up this idea—that
prediction is fundamental not only to intelligence and the brain but to life itself—and
explores the wide-ranging implications. These include radical new perspectives on the
computational properties of living systems the evolutionary and social origins of intelligence
the relationship between models and reality entropy and the nature of time the meaning of
free will the problem of consciousness and the ethics of machine intelligence. The book
offers a unified picture of intelligence from molecules to organisms societies and AI
drawing from a wide array of literature in many fields including computer science and machine
learning biology physics and neuroscience. It also adds recent and novel findings from the
author his research team and colleagues. Combining technical rigor and deep up-to-the-minute
knowledge about AI development the natural sciences (especially neuroscience) and
philosophical literacy What Is Intelligence? argues—quite against the grain—that certain
modern AI systems do indeed have a claim to intelligence consciousness and free will.
