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Artificial intelligence researcher Blaise Aguera y Arcas' Who Are We Now? takes a data-driven approach to understanding American identity—especially sexual identity—in 2023. In this interview, he shares some surprising findings, explains his methodology, and describes how American sexuality has evolved since the infamous 1948 Kinsey reports.
JT: What made you decide that a data-driven book about American sexuality was a good and necessary idea in 2023 (and 2016, when you began your research)?
BA: It didn’t begin as a book about sexuality, but about tribalism. In 2016, it was obvious that American politics was becoming increasingly polarized, and that group identity, rather than specific policy debates, was driving that polarization.
Collective identity can be constructed around anything, of course, but sexuality connects to our deep biological inheritance. Sex is how we reproduce, and in traditional societies, reproduction is a really big deal.
But today, we’re rapidly urbanizing. Revolutions in agriculture and medicine have allowed our numbers to explode, straining Earth’s resources. Fortunately, population is set to peak and decline this century, due for the first time to reproductive choice rather than premature death.
So, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that sex and gender are central “culture wars” issues, given we’re now thinking about sexuality as increasingly decoupled from reproduction—especially in cities.
It feels almost inevitable to compare Who We Are Now to The Kinsey Report, not just because both focus on data analysis of sexuality, but also because, like Kinsey, you demonstrate that American sexuality is a lot more complex and variable than most public discussions acknowledge. It’s been seventy-five years since Kinsey shocked the nation, and ideas about sexuality have evolved an enormous amount since then. Does your book owe a debt to Kinsey? More importantly, how do your methods and conclusions differ from Kinsey’s?
BA: I do owe them a debt! Unlike most older “sexologists,” who relied on lurid anecdotes, the Kinsey team asked large numbers of people the kinds of personal questions that generate real data, in addition to gathering freer-form narratives. I’ve done the same, and— thanks to modern tools and techniques— with more statistical rigor.
Hopefully Who Are We Now? is as full of surprises as the Kinsey Reports were, even for today’s more worldly audiences. I hope, too, that it continues the project of normalizing the great hidden diversity of human biology, identity, and behavior.
The book is full of surprises. Those surprises often come from the voices of subjects who have responded to your surveys. Why was it important for you to include those voices, and what surprised you?
BA: The book includes a lot of data. It felt important to me, though, to contextualize and humanize the findings— to make them not just understood, but felt. Including the voices of survey respondents seemed like the right way to do that.
Every survey I administered consisted of dozens of yes/no questions, followed by an optional open-ended question like “Is there anything you’d like to add?” Many people took the time to respond thoughtfully. Sometimes they wanted to clarify apparent contradictions— say, why they had answered “yes” both to being left-handed and right-handed, or male and female. Those explanations helped me develop an intuition for a lot of “excluded middles” we tend to miss, since language biases us toward the logic of distinct categories.
Many surprises in the book relate to those excluded middles. For example, one respondent wrote that she was a “woman in gender, born with a chimeric testicle in place of the right ovary. I like to joke I ate my twin brother in the womb. I’ve named this prototeste Conrad the Gonad.”
This eye-opener led me to explore the subject of chimerism, in which fraternal twins fuse in the uterus, resulting in people whose bodies consist of genetically different populations of cells. Half the time, such cases will result in a mixture of female (XX) and male (XY) cells. Although this is well documented among other animals, there are supposedly only a hundred documented cases of such “gynandromorphic” humans. Yet a different survey respondent wrote, “chromosomal mix, XX and XY, fusing of fraternal twin eggs.” So how rare is it?
How many people did you survey over what period time? How did you ensure that the pools was representative. Will you say a little about your methods?
BA: I surveyed roughly 30,000 Americans, and was able to repeat the major surveys over several years, producing enough of a portrait over time to see meaningful changes.
I used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, a gig platform for information work. Mechanical Turk workers aren’t an unbiased sample, of course. Respondents can’t be under 18, and ages 50+ are underrepresented. There are some other biases too: more women than in the general population, and more city dwellers. However, I’ve compensated for most of the obvious biases by reweighting responses to represent the US population as a whole.
You write that “the monogamous pair bond is far from universal today. It’s not the historical norm, and it’s ‘unnatural’ insofar as it doesn’t come easily to many, requiring constant legal, social, and moral enforcement.” How monogamous are Americans? What are some of the most common alternatives to monogamy.
BA: While marriage used to predominate, only about 48% of American adults are married today. A quarter of young adults are “not monogamous,” though typically this means they’re unpartnered or just dating. Across all ages, roughly 10% are non-monogamous, meaning that they have more than one partner, and about 5% say they are polyamorous, meaning that their partners know and it’s consensual. In cities, those numbers are even higher.
Although consensual non-monogamy is an old idea, the word “polyamorous” was coined very recently—by a Neopagan witch named Morning Glory, around 1990! Since her fascinating story connects to several of the book’s broader themes, I relate it in an interlude. It’s interesting to see how quickly the movement she started has gone mainstream.
Kinsey argued the sexual identity can be mapped along a continuum, or spectrum–and even numbered. For example, a person might be a Kinsey 1 or 6. You suggest we need a more complex conceptual framework for understanding sexual identity. What are more accurate ways of conceiving sexual identity?
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BA: Any scheme for taxonomizing people or their sexual attraction will have shortcomings. Still, it’s easy to improve on the Kinsey scale simply by adding a dimension.
Imagine a 2D space in which one axis represents same-sex attraction, and the other is opposite-sex attraction. This visualization allows us to put asexuality (low attraction, either way) on the map. In addition to homosexuality and heterosexuality forming a “spectrum,” the 2D view shows how asexuality and bisexuality are continuous, as you move along the diagonal. A number of free-response answers suggest that this reflects many people’s lived experience.
Nowadays, though, some people prefer to describe their attraction as “pansexual," highlighting the limitations of making any strictly binary distinction by sex.
What do you hope readers will learn from your book?
BA: It covers a lot of territory, but there are some big messages. One is that everyday language, and the apparent logic of its strict (yet contested) definitions, is only a cartoon. Beneath that cartoon, with its flat planes and crisp borders, is a curved, fuzzy, and context-dependent reality. By studying real data and looking outside our bubbles, we can start to gain a more accurate understanding of that reality, and that is a worthwhile project. Especially when it comes to human identity, a more accurate view feels important, as it highlights the arbitrariness of the borders we seem so keen on erecting between us and those we deem “other.”
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