Berggruen Institute

Future Humans is an interdisciplinary research initiative focused on exploring new configurations of life in the 21st century.

Our work is organized around a central question: What will life become?

Across neuroscience, biotechnology, astrobiology, and multispecies ecology, emerging technologies of perception are reshaping how life, intelligence, and consciousness are sensed, defined, and encountered. Future Humans maps this shifting philosophical and cultural terrain, recognizing the limits of inherited anthropocentric frameworks amid rapid technological and ecological transformation.

Through research collaborations and cultural production—including workshops, lectures, digital platforms, publications, films, and exhibitions—Future Humans works with scientists, philosophers, artists, writers, and technologists to examine how ideas of life are formed, tested, and transformed.

Dr. Claire Isabel Webb, a historian of science, directs the Future Humans Program. Her research examines how scientists have historically imagined, modeled, and anticipated nonhuman and extraterrestrial life—and how those practices shape possible encounters with novel life forms.

Future Humans was founded in 2023 as a program of the Berggruen Institute, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization with offices in Los Angeles, Beijing, and Venice.

Proxima Kósmos
A collaboration that wields scientific modeling and radical imagination to explore speculative yet plausible exoplanetary worlds, rethinking assumptions about life beyond Earth.

Future Wunderkammer
A digital cabinet of curiosities housing artifacts from speculative futures—artifacts conceptualized from ever-evolving technologies, ecologies, and forms of intelligence.

Vaster Than Empires
An annual convening inspired by the legacy of Ursula K. Le Guin, bringing together science-fiction writers, scientists, and artists to explore deep time, collective intelligence, and more-than-human futures through speculative inquiry.

Future Histories of Life, Otherwise
A research and publishing project using counterfactual history and speculative storytelling to reconsider how scientific pasts shape possible futures of life.

Multispecies Constitution
An interdisciplinary research initiative exploring how concepts of life, responsibility, and coexistence shift when nonhuman beings and systems are taken seriously as part of shared worlds.

Embodied Machines
A research and convening project examining how new forms of embodied intelligence challenge inherited definitions of life, agency, and autonomy.

Consciousness
A forthcoming research initiative bringing neuroscience, artificial intelligence, philosophy, and contemplative traditions into dialogue around the nature of consciousness.