Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a Fellow at Google Research who has invented AI and privacy technologies, spoken at TED and many other conferences, done pioneering work in computational humanities, and written widely circulated essays at the intersections of machine intelligence, art, ethics, and social science. He leads an organization focusing on distributed, ethical, and on-device AI at Google's Seattle office and other locations worldwide. In 2016, he wrote an influential essay exploring the relationship between art and technology, and in 2017 he co-authored another popular essay on physiognomy and bias in AI, as well as a refutation of claims that facial structure reveals sexual orientation. His recent essay, Do Large Language Models Understand Us?, offers a perspective on the current state of the art in language AI and its implications.