About this Event
The Long Now Foundation welcomes
Baratunde Thurston & Blaise Aguera y Arcas
Attend the in-person or via our
Mix and mingle over drinks and small bites with other attendees at our pre & post-show gathering in the re-imagined Cowell Theater Lobby!
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.
Why This Talk Matters Now
As technology accelerates, “intelligence” is being redefined from two directions. New AI models are becoming increasingly capable, while biologists are finding intelligence in surprising places: single cells, fungal networks, immune systems, and whale song. The prevailing narrative about how human, animal, and synthetic minds relate is one of dominance and competition. Both Thurston and Agüera y Arcas argue this story misreads how living systems actually work: dominance is the exception in nature, symbiosis the rule. Together they arrive at a new approach to navigating technology’s current rate of change.
The Long View
Long-term thinking asks us to consider relationships across immense time scales. This requires us to take responsibility for the people, species, and systems we’ll never meet or create. That's what traditions of seven-generation thinking have always asked of us, and it only gets harder as the future changes shape. In a world where new intelligences are rapidly coming online, we need to extend an interdependence mindset across the species and ecosystems we already know, and the new minds that we’re creating and discovering.
Learn More
WATCH:
- Baratunde Thurston: From Me to We: A Story of Interdependence at Bioneers
- Blaise Agüera y Arcas: What is Intelligence? Long Now Talk
READ:
By Baratunde Thurston
- Foreword to (available at the Talk)
- 250 Years Since Its Founding, America Needs a Declaration of Interdependence, Atmos Magazine
By Blaise Agüera y Arcas
- from Antikythera / MIT Press (available at the Talk)
- Life, Intelligence, and Consciousness: A Functional Perspective on Long Now Ideas
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 , co-created and hosts the civic podcast , hosted and executive produced the PBS series , and wrote the New York Times bestseller How to Be Black. He wrote the foreword to . 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, , from Antikythera and MIT Press was published in September 02025.
is a globally-recognized champion of long-term thinking and responsibility, operating within the context of the next and last 10,000 years — a timespan we call the long now. Launched by Stewart Brand in 02003, has invited more than 400 leading thinkers to share their civilization-scale ideas with a live audience on stage in San Francisco and with millions more around the globe through our podcast and videos.
Event venue & nearby stays
Cowell Theater, Pier 2, Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, United States
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