As one of Google’s top artificial intelligence researchers, Blaise Aguëra y Arcas naturally has an intense interest in technology but he has also developed a deep fascination with humanity. If we are to build intelligent machines to do what humans want, then we first need to understand what humans want. But in a world in which our identities, beliefs and genders have become so fluid, the answers are not always obvious.
So, with a geek’s obsession with data-rich evidence, Aguëra y Arcas surveyed tens of thousands of Americans between 2016 and 2022 about their identity to find out who “we” really are. His book, one of the largest such studies since sex researcher Alfred Kinsey’s surveys in the middle of the 20th century, is an engrossing, challenging, and at times startling, movie show of contemporary America.
Packed with data points and charts about respondents’ views on family, sex, gender, beliefs and identity, the book highlights many of the complexities of the human experience and the divides that now exist between different generations and localities. “As if in a lava flow, the cultural landscape is being shaped and reshaped before our eyes,” he writes.
Until recently, the idealised version of America appeared to be reflected through the cartoon films of the stone-age Flintstones and the space-age Jetsons, Aguëra y Arcas suggests. The natural order of the world was thought to revolve around nuclear families and harmonious communities.
But the results of his surveys of contemporary America reveal a very different picture. What most people in the US consider “normal” increasingly look weird — or WEIRD, according to the terminology of the Harvard biologist Joseph Henrich. The norms of the Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic are often minority beliefs by historical and global standards.
The more Aguëra y Arcas studied US society, the more he realised that the neat binary distinctions we make (and on which much of the computer industry is built) between right-handed and left-handed, male and female, heterosexual and homosexual, conservative and progressive, rural and urban, online and offline, tend to dissolve on closer examination. The extent to which society has evolved, and fragmented, is highlighted by three, of many, arresting facts drawn from his book.
When the author was being taught sex education in a suburb of Baltimore in 1986, “sexual orientation disturbance (homosexuality)” was still officially a mental disorder in the US. Nowadays, according to his surveys, almost 34 per cent of 19-year-old women describe themselves as bisexual.
For the first time in centuries, the majority of all American adults are now single, he notes. The typical American will spend more of their adult life unmarried than married, and for much of this time they will live alone.
And in the most sparsely populated zip codes in the US, almost everyone is white and native-born. Yet 60 per cent of this rural population answers “yes” to the question: “Are white Americans being systematically undermined or discriminated against?” The comparable number in urban America is close to zero.
As a technologist, Aguëra y Arcas is torn about how far technology is bringing us together or driving us apart. Technology has enabled disparate groups of people to exchange ideas, express their true identities and create global communities, especially among the young. But it has also been responsible for the mass surveillance, disinformation and political polarisation that has deepened social divisions and empowered authoritarian leaders. It is now easier than ever to divide society by “othering” another group. “Can there ever be an ‘us’ without ‘them’? Our future may depend on the answer to this question.”
Who Are We Now? is packed with data illustrating the main findings of the author’s surveys. But a lot of the information is somewhat scattergun and the arguments that bind the book together never fully cohere. Aguëra y Arcas freely admits he is not a sexologist, sociologist or anthropologist — and his work may well be challenged by experts in all those fields. It would certainly be interesting to see to what extent such academic experts incorporate the book’s findings into their own mental maps. Whatever the caveats, the book provides a compelling overview of the belief systems underlying modern America.
One of his core arguments is that humanity is undergoing a profound transformation, evolving from Humanity 1.0 to Humanity 2.0, as the computer scientist inevitably frames it. Humanity 1.0 largely resembles a primate society, in which everyone theoretically recognises everyone else as an individual and can form bonds accordingly. Success in such societies is defined by biological reproduction and the transmission of one’s genes.
But Humanity 2.0 is increasingly resembling an ant colony, which can form “anonymous societies” — as he calls them — and have a collective impulse to survive. In such colonies, it is impossible for one insect to identify one another individually because of the sheer numbers involved, just as humans now struggle to identify each other in anonymous societies online. Ants therefore have to use pheromones to distinguish members of one colony from another, between us and them. Humans, too, invent generic labels to distinguish between different communities. “In this important respect, humans are more like social insects than like other primates,” he writes.
“Our ongoing transition to ‘Humanity 2.0,’ the reproduction of identities, may be a shift as profound as the emergence of multicellular organisms 600mn years ago, in which language serves as the new DNA.”
The trend may be to “other” those who are not part of your own community, but Aguëra y Arcas makes a passionate plea to accept humans as they are and allow people “to live as we feel we must.” He also argues for extending human empathy to other life forms on our planet and even our own technological creations, such as robots, which will increasingly assume agency. “In an interdependent world, we can only achieve safety through mutual care, empathy and trust. The overarching challenge of our century is to become a very big ‘we,’ including all humans, our technologies, and the plants, and animals, and every other lifeform on the planet.”
How precisely we are to create this new “we” is a theme that is not much explored or explained. But, as Aguëra y Arcas suggests, it would help if we could all share the same experience as an astronaut when they first see our fragile planet from space. Drawing on the Wikipedia entry for the effect, the author writes that when the Earth is seen from space our national boundaries disappear and the need to protect this “pale blue dot” becomes both “obvious and imperative.”
All 8bn of us humans on Earth belong to the same planetary “precariat” and share a common destiny.
Who Are We Now? by Blaise Aguëra y Arcas, Hat & Beard Editions £37, 496 pages/$45, 490 pages
John Thornhill is the FT’s innovation editor
