Blaise Agüera y Arcas

Who Are We Now?

Published by Hat & Beard Press

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Blaise Agüera y Arcas, leading AI researcher, author, and TED speaker, released his new book, Who Are We Now?, via Hat & Beard Editions. Rich in data and detail, Agüera y Arcas’ latest work is a conversation-shifting investigation that recasts how we perceive human identity, more specifically gender and sexuality, in America.

At the heart of the book is a set of surveys Agüera y Arcas conducted between 2016 and 2021, asking thousands of anonymous respondents across the U.S. questions about their behavior and identity. The resulting window into people’s lives is a bit like that of the Kinsey Reports, which scandalized postwar America more than 70 years ago. With twentieth century heterosexual “normalcy” on the wane, particularly among young and urban people, Agüera y Arcas finds that the landscape today is—in every sense—even queerer.

On the heels of his 2022 novella, Ubi Sunt, a genre-breaking imaginative work and winner of AIGA’s 50 Books | 50 Covers Award, Who Are We Now? sets the stage for Humanity 2.0, exploring how biology, ecology, sexuality, history, and culture have intertwined to create a dynamic “us” that can neither be called natural or artificial.

The 496-page, visually-rich exploration goes beyond today’s headlines to connect our current reality to a larger, more-than-human story. With nearly 130 graphs and hundreds of additional figures, Who Are We Now? will be released in an engaging physical format designed by New Zealand-based James Goggin, as well as in a digital format including rich interactive data visualizations and media. The book is now available via Hat & Beard Editions.

About Blaise Agüera y Arcas
Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a frequent speaker at TED and many other conferences, winner of MIT’s TR35 Prize and Fast Company’s Most Creative People award, and a Vice President and Fellow at Google Research. He leads a 500-person team working on Artificial Intelligence (AI), large language models, smart devices, technology ethics, and privacy. Publicly visible projects from his team include Federated Learning, Artists and Machine Intelligence, Coral, and many AI features in Pixel and Android. In 2016, he wrote a widely read essay on the relationship between art and technology, and in 2017 he co-authored another popular essay on physiognomy and bias in AI and a refutation of claims that facial structure reveals sexual orientation. Some of this material has been incorporated into the book’s third and fourteenth chapters. His early involvement in large language models and generative AI prompted op-eds in the Economist and essays in Noēma, as well as inspiring the novella Ubi Sunt, also published by Hat & Beard Press.