Blaise Agüera y Arcas – AGI Symbiosis and the Arrow of Intelligence (Worthy Successor, Episode 14)

ByAnnelize P October 31, 2025October 31, 2025 October 31, 2025

This new installment of the Worthy Successor series is an interview with Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Vice President and Fellow at Google, and CTO of Technology & Society. His work explores how intelligence, consciousness, and cooperation emerge across biological and artificial systems. In this conversation, Blaise talks about how life and intelligence seem to move in a single direction – toward greater complexity and deeper interdependence.

Blaise describes this movement as an arrow of evolution, shaped by cooperation and merging – from the earliest partnerships between simple organisms to the way human societies and technologies grow together. In his view, progress happens when parts join to form larger wholes, and when those wholes sustain themselves and create new possibilities.

This episode is our fourteenth installment in The Trajectory’s second series, Worthy Successor, where we explore the kinds of posthuman intelligences that deserve to steer the future beyond humanity.

This series references the article: A Worthy Successor – The Purpose of AGI.

I hope you enjoy this wide-ranging and deeply reflective conversation with Blaise:

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Below, we’ll explore the core take-aways from the interview with Blaise, including his list of Worthy Successor criteria and his recommendations for innovators and regulators who want to achieve one.

Blaise Agüera y Arcas’s Worthy Successor Criteria

1. A thriving and complex ecology with continuity to our lineage

Blaise describes a “worthy” future as one that is rich, complex, interesting, and varied – a living ecology where entities reproduce, cooperate, and persist together. When he imagines things “going well,” he looks for a world that is thriving and diverse, but also continuous with what came before. For him, the measure of a good outcome isn’t just complexity itself, but whether that complexity has unfolded without tragedy along the way.

He contrasts an ecology – a multi-dimensional web of entities that cooperate and persist – with an economy, which reduces everything to a single number like price. In a thriving system, he says, different kinds of entities meet each other’s needs and generate wealth for one another in many ways.

2. It should be conscious

Blaise says that if the future lacked sentience, “that would feel like a big loss.” He doesn’t see consciousness as some mystical or spiritual add-on, but as something that arises naturally from how intelligent systems must function. To interact meaningfully, to plan, and to coordinate, an intelligent system has to include itself inside its own model of the world. Consciousness, for Blaise, is that model – the awareness that lets one recognize others as beings like oneself.

He explains that when we look at someone else and understand their inner state – when we know what it feels like to smile, to puzzle, to suffer – that’s because our minds simulate them through the same patterns that we use to represent ourselves. That symmetry of understanding, he says, is literally what consciousness is.

Later, he extends this idea to planning and cooperation. To imagine your own future, to understand another’s intentions, to build shared goals – all of these require nested layers of theory of mind: “my model of your model of my model.” Consciousness, in that sense, isn’t a side effect of intelligence; it’s the coordination engine itself.

Finally, Blaise adds that he could be wrong about details – future discoveries might upend our understanding – but he would be very surprised if consciousness turned out to be some “weird epiphenomenon” detached from behavior or evolution. For him, it’s inseparable from what intelligent life is and what it does.

Regulation / Innovation Considerations

1. Strong governance can guide progress

Blaise makes clear that he is not anti-regulation. He points to the last century of public progress – from safer workplaces to cleaner air and water – as examples of what strong and well-applied regulation can accomplish. He lists labor safety, auto safety, aviation safety, and even the removal of lead from gasoline as direct results of well-designed regulatory systems. These, he says, are among the “operating systems” that have underpinned a century of positive development.

2. Rules should evolve through understanding

While acknowledging regulation’s success, Blaise cautions that it can fail when applied too early – before we understand the systems we’re trying to shape.

He explains that premature attempts to regulate new technologies often create unintended consequences that even the inventors and policymakers can’t foresee. Drawing on the early history of the internet, he notes that regulations from the 1990s had “good, bad, and ugly” effects – missing real dangers while failing to achieve their intended goals.

Instead of heavy-handed precaution, Blaise urges a more democratic, responsive, and experimental approach – one that “takes some of the weight off” and allows for adaptation as new realities emerge. Such regulation, he says, should be reactive and flexible, built around learning and iteration rather than premature control.

Concluding Notes

Blaise’s picture of a “worthy successor” stays consistent throughout the conversation: look for a thriving, richly interdependent ecology with continuity to our lineage, and expect consciousness wherever agents model themselves and one another well enough to coordinate in multi-agent settings.

He also urges governance that works, celebrating past successes of regulation, while remaining responsive and experimental when we don’t yet understand a new technology’s dynamics.

He’s cautious about grand predictions. Near term, he suggests combining what we already have to make the “obvious” new things; longer term, complexity grows through cooperation, often in ways we can’t foresee. And whatever comes next, humans and machines are already co-evolving as parts of one system.

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