Welcome to the Playing Books podcast. Thank you for tuning in to the intelligence episode of the podcast. The episode asks a question as old as humanity and as urgent as the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI): What is intelligence, really?

Today, we’re sitting with Blaise Agüera y Arcas’s What Is Intelligence?: Lessons from AI About Evolution, Computing, and Minds, an inspiring and revealing book that refuses to give you the same old answers. Instead, it invites you into a living conversation about how minds form, how systems learn, how evolution computes, and how intelligence might be far more fluid, emergent, and interconnected than we’ve ever allowed ourselves to imagine.

This episode is for anyone who has ever wondered why AI feels both familiar and alien, why human creativity can’t be reduced to code, and why the future of thinking, human and machine, depends on humility, curiosity, and a willingness to rethink everything we assume about cognition. We talk about pattern‑making, meaning‑building, the strange parallels between neural networks and natural selection, and the uncomfortable truth that intelligence may not be a ladder but a landscape.

If you’re building, designing, parenting, leading, or simply trying to understand the world you’re living in, this conversation will give you frameworks you can actually use. Blaise Agüera y Arcas’s What Is Intelligence?: Lessons from AI About Evolution, Computing, and Minds challenges many assumptions and reveals new insights that lead to better questions and answers. We recommend the book. Consider purchasing it on Amazon, from your favorite bookstore, or requesting it from a local library. It’s worth having on your shelf and in your mind.

Intelligence lives in many minds and lips in schools, workplaces, newsstands, libraries, and other such places as AI continues to dominate. Please share your thoughts. Comment, share, follow, subscribe, and recommend the Playing Books Podcast to someone who loves big ideas and brave conversations. We leave you with a parting question: Do you consider yourself intelligent?

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Thank you for listening, for thinking with us, and for being part of the Playing Books family.