Event Description

AI Humanist Blaise Agüera y Arcas will be joining us for a discussion and signing alongside Zoe Stoller!

Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a leading AI researcher, author and CTO of Technology & Society at Google. He is a winner of MIT Technology Review’s TR35 Prize and Fast Company’s Most Creative People Award, as well as a frequent speaker at TED and many other conferences.

His latest book, Who Are We Now?, is a conversation-shifting investigation that recasts how we perceive human identity, and specifically gender and sexuality, in America. Wide-ranging and data-driven, Who Are We Now? is built around 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, Agüera y Arcas finds that the

landscape today is—in every sense—even queerer. Until the recent past, our human condition was characterized by a struggle to survive and reproduce. In overcoming those Malthusian limits, we’ve strained, and exceeded, planetary limits. Domesticated animals far outweigh wildlife, and many species are in catastrophic decline. Yet today, our own fertility is curbed by choice rather than by premature death.

On the heels of his critically acclaimed 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.

This 496-page, visually-rich exploration of human identity contains 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.

“In his new book, Agüera y Arcas takes on an ambitious survey to learn how the sense of our identities have changed over time. It turns out, we’re way weirder than you would think.” — Dan Savage, Savage Lovecast

The event will be moderated by Zoe Stoller!
Zoe Stoller (pronouns: they/she/he) is a queer and non-binary educator, content creator, and licensed social worker based in Philadelphia. Zoe is passionate about spreading LGBTQ+ and mental health knowledge, visibility, and authenticity through the power of social media and community work, and they create and share their own educational LGBTQ+ content on all social media platforms at @ZoeStoller. In her spare time, Zoe loves to play video games, spend time with her dog, and do creative projects (she’s gotten very into ceramics lately!).