This conversation is part of a special lecture celebrating the launch of What Is Intelligence? by Blaise Agüera y Arcas at The Long Now Foundation in San Francisco. The full lecture, available on YouTube, explores the nature of intelligence and how the rise of AI may be a natural outcome of evolution, drawing from decades of research, literature, and artificial life experiments. The print edition of What Is Intelligence? can be ordered from the MIT Press bookstore, and the digital article —expanding on the provocative ideas through cinematic fragments, data visualizations, and visual annotations — is published in the Antikythera: Journal for the Philosophy of Planetary Computation.Benjamin Bratton:There’s a lot that can be said about the first chapter of the book, which was also the little single What Is Life? To put a book called What Is Life? inside a book called What Is Intelligence? — that’s the whole argument right there in a way…But what I wanted to talk a little bit about was the arrow of time, and particularly the arrow of time as one that we can map through not just increasing complexity — life as the ability to fight entropy and so forth, increasing complexity — but also increasing complexity that goes through phase transitions. These phase transitions are ones that, as you’ve made the point quite clearly, retain what came before. It’s not just “done with the old, here’s the new.” All of what came before us is still inside us.Blaise Agüera y Arcas:That’s the amazing thing. We are societies of bodies, of colonies of conjoined bacteria. All of us are just bacteria in this room. They’re still here, nested like matryoshka dolls. Even if you zoom into a bacterium, then further into the mitochondrion, what you see reproduced there—the conditions of the deep-sea vents where mitochondria first evolved. Nick Lane makes this point beautifully in his book Transformer. It’s almost like they artificialize, in your language, the environment they originally evolved in, a