Baratunde Thurston & Blaise Agüera y Arcas
On Interdependence
This event is made possible with generous support from the John Templeton Foundation.
Join us for a conversation exploring interdependence as the core governing principle of nature and intelligence. Featuring Baratunde Thurston (Emmy-nominated producer and host of How to Citizen) and Blaise Agüera y Arcas (VP at Paradigms of Intelligence team at Google), we will examine how cooperation, rather than dominance, will shape our collective survival over the next 10,000 years.
Baratunde Thurston writes on interdependence as an Indigenous principle revealing a law of nature exhibited by all living systems. Relationships are core to sustaining life. In this age of cascading crises, Thurston urges, choosing to live in the truth of our interdependence may be the most important choice we can make.
Blaise Agüera y Arcas explores the future of evolving intelligence through the lens of AI symbiosis. He argues that dominance hierarchies are not how life on Earth tends to thrive; instead, cooperation is as vital a force as competition. Because explosions in intelligence are rooted in the collective, we are already part of everything we create, which in turn, is co-creating us.
bio
Baratunde Thurston is a writer, host, and speaker exploring how we live well with technology, with each other, and with the planet. He has spent decades creating with and criticizing technology, from The Onion to The Daily Show to Life With Machines, his public interest media company, which won a 2026 People's Voice Webby for Best Creative Use of AI and Tech. His work helps us co-create a future that doesn't suck, integrating humanity, humor, and a deep sense of place into the conversation about where we are taking technology, and who gets to decide.
Baratunde hosts Life With Machines, co-created and hosts the civic podcast How To Citizen, hosted and executive produced the PBS series America Outdoors, and wrote the New York Times bestseller How to Be Black. He wrote the foreword to American Indigenous Democracy: A Call for Interdependence. He keynotes for and advises organizations that want to think hard about technology and the future without losing sight of the people and the planet it's meant to serve.
His worldview is grounded in the truth of our interdependence, which has made him one of the few voices in technology also trusted in Indigenous communities, cited by faith leaders, built into civic curricula, and formally recognized for making people laugh.
At the end of the day, he's an Earthling.
Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a VP and Fellow at Google, where he is the CTO of Technology & Society and founder of Paradigms of Intelligence (Pi). Pi is an organization working on basic research in AI and related fields, especially the foundations of neural computing, active inference, sociality, evolution, and artificial life.
In 2008, Blaise was awarded MIT’s TR35 prize. During his tenure at Google, Blaise has innovated on-device machine learning for Android and Pixel; invented Federated Learning, an approach to decentralized model training that avoids sharing private data; and founded the Artists + Machine Intelligence program.
A frequent public speaker, he has given multiple TED talks and keynoted NeurIPS. He has also authored numerous papers, essays, op-eds, and chapters, as well as two previous books, Who Are We Now? and Ubi Sunt. His most recent book, What Is Life? is part 1 of the larger book What Is Intelligence?, forthcoming from Antikythera and MIT Press in September 2025.
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