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, Hollywood gender equality work with the Geena Davis Institute, 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.

While Blaise's role at Google focuses on AI, his career has often been at the intersection of computing with other disciplines in the sciences and humanities. He raised early alarms (starting in 2015) about fairness and bias in machine learning, which led to deeper study of the differential impacts of technology on people underrepresented in tech. His quest to map the changing landscape of human identification with minority and majority subgroups led to this book. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

"An engrossing and startling movie show of identity in America today."

-- Financial Times, Best Books of the Week

"With his new book, Agüera y Arcas reckons with grand questions of identity and technology, and the ways in which evolutions within both are shaping the world we live in."

-- InsideHook

"Who Are We Now? takes a data-driven approach to understanding American identity--especially sexual identity--in 2023."

-- Psychology Today

"Toggling between the individual and the global, Who Are We Now? does an admirable job of asking questions more of us should be pondering."

-- Frontier Magazine

"Artificial intelligence researcher and author Blaise Agüera y Arcas investigates how we perceive gender and sexuality in America."

-- LGBTQ Nation

"Blaise Agüera y Arcas [is] one of the most interesting AI researchers of our time."

-- The Stranger

"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

"A fascinating, provocative account of the contradictions and complications of identity and community in the technological age."

-- Sonia Katyal, Distinguished Law Professor and Co-director, Center for Law and Technology, at UC Berkeley School of Law

"This is that rare book that not only explores a fascinating topic, but that teaches you how to think more deeply about any topic. Insightful and original."

-- Tim O'Reilly, author, publisher, and founder of O'Reilly Media

Publisher: Hat & Beard Press

Pub date: 2023-12-19

Length: 490 pages