Functions As Forms: From Computation to Agency
Blaise Agüera y Arcas · Google Research · AI & machine intelligence
Overview
Blaise Agüera y Arcas leads AI work at Google and has argued — in Who Are We Now? and recent work on computation and the origins of life — that agency and even life are better understood as computational phenomena that emerge once simple programs start interacting, replicating, and competing. His symposium title, “Functions As Forms,” takes the Platonic question into machine intelligence: the functions a learning system converges on may themselves be the relevant forms — abstract, substrate-independent structures that many different systems rediscover. This resonates strongly with the Platonic Representation Hypothesis, the observation that large neural networks trained on different data and modalities drift toward a shared internal geometry, as if converging on the same underlying space of representations. The talk is expected to trace the arc from computation to agency: how form-like functions, once instantiated, start to behave like goal-directed agents.
AI-generated overview based on the talk title and the speaker's published work; the authoritative recording is on the symposium YouTube playlist.