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  • ESSAY

What is the future of intelligence? The answer could lie in the story of its evolution

The advent of artificial intelligence might be just the latest stage in a guiding biological process that has produced ever more complex, mutually dependent organisms over the history of life.
By
  1. Blaise Agüera y Arcas

    1. Blaise Agüera y Arcas is chief technology officer of technology and society and head of the Paradigms of Intelligence team at Google, and is based in Seattle, Washington. He is the author of What Is Life? (2025) and What is Intelligence? (2025).

A stylised illustration three dimensional render of a human holding their arms out touching a glowing orb and a digital cube. Above them is a brain split into two halves, one side is organic and the other side is digital and covered in a glowing network mesh. The whole environment is dark and space-like with glowing networks.

Illustration: Jacey

Ten years ago, I would have turned my nose up at the idea that we already understood how to get machines to think. In the 2010s, my team at Google Research was working on a wide variety of artificial-intelligence models, including the next-word predictor that powers the keyboard on Android smartphones. Artificial neural networks of the sort we were training were finally solving long-standing challenges in visual perception, speech recognition, game playing and many other domains. But it seemed absurd to me that a mere next-word predictor could ever truly understand new concepts, write jokes, debug code or do any of the myriad other things that are hallmarks of human intelligence.

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Nature 647, 846-850 (2025)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-03857-0

References

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Competing Interests

B.A.A. is employed by Google and owns some Google stock.

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