Baratunde Thurston & Blaise Agüera y Arcas — Long Now Talks
Emmy-nominated storyteller and Google AI researcher examine the ethical stakes of artificial intelligence and what active citizenship means in a world shaped by machines.
Why we picked this
Two thinkers who've spent years working at the intersection of technology and human values — one as a storyteller, one as an AI researcher — sharing a stage on the questions neither field can answer alone.
Baratunde Thurston is a cultural commentator who has spent his career trying to help people engage with their world more thoughtfully — as citizens, as neighbors, as participants rather than spectators. He hosted PBS’s America Outdoors, created the How To Citizen podcast, and wrote How To Be Black, all in service of the same underlying question: what does it mean to actually show up? His current project, Life with Machines, examines how technology integration reshapes that question at the most basic level of daily life.
Blaise Agüera y Arcas is VP and Fellow at Google, where he serves as CTO of Technology & Society and founded the Paradigms of Intelligence program. He invented Federated Learning — a foundational technique for training AI on distributed data without centralizing it — and founded the Artists + Machine Intelligence initiative. His recent book What Is Life? takes the question beyond biology to probe what computation, intelligence, and consciousness actually share.
Together, the conversation will circle the most pressing questions in technology right now: what AI makes possible, what it makes dangerous, and what being a responsible person in that world actually requires. The Long Now Foundation, which takes the long view on human civilization, is an ideal venue for this particular reckoning.