Thinking in Questions
Can universalism be reimagined for a plural world?
In an age marked by both fragmentation and connection, what does it mean to speak of “universal” values? The Universalism project investigates how philosophical, religious, and political traditions from around the world can inform a more inclusive, nuanced understanding of the universal—one that resists homogenization and embraces difference.
What forms of governance are adequate to the condition of planetarity?
Crises like climate change, pandemic response, and biodiversity loss demand governance structures capable of operating at the planetary scale—yet our current institutions remain rooted in the logic of national sovereignty and international politics. The Planetary Summit convened thinkers and leaders to ask: What would governance look like if it were grounded in interdependence, plurality, and care, rather than competition and control? How might we move from reactive politics to a more holistic architecture of planetary governance?
How can California serve as a laboratory for democratic renewal?
With democracy under threat around the planet, we must ask: what does democracy look like beyond elections? The State of California is answering that by using new digital tools to experiment with forms of democratic engagement that amplify Californians' voices. Called Engaged California, the State's new deliberative program aims to bring everyday Californians into meaningful dialogue with each other and their government to better inform policy decisions and increase trust and understanding in our society.
Can Europe rediscover itself as a laboratory for philosophy?
As Europe navigates war, migration, climate breakdown, and democratic backsliding, its identity is at a crossroads. Geophilosophy of Europe explores Europe not as a fixed political entity, but as a space of thought—one shaped by diverse histories, shifting borders, and cultural contradictions. Through this lens, we ask: what is Europe, and what might it become?
Is the future predicted or invented?
At the Berggruen Institute, we know that we need more than prediction to name what’s next; we need invention. Each week, the Futurology podcast introduces us to scientists and philosophers recalibrating our cosmologies, technologists coming to terms with alien intelligence, and policymakers scrambling to design systems for a world in flux.
What is “co-becoming” (共生)?
“Co-becoming” — gongsheng in Chinese or kyōsei in Japanese — sees the world as consisting of mutually embedded, coexistent, and co-generating entities. Challenging the modern notion of the individual as an self-contained and autonomous agent, co-becoming offers a “planetary” framework to rethink our self-perceptions, our relationship with “others”, and our role in the environment.
What is Intelligence?
Much of what is traditionally categorized as “life,” “intelligence,” and “technology” is combining in new ways (synthetic biology, artificial life, and AI). So too are the definitions of these terms, in ways that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. Are these three words—life, intelligence, technology—actually different names for the effects of a more general process?
In a publication by Antikythera and MIT Press, AI researcher Blaise Agüera y Arcas proposes a new view of intelligence rooted in symbiogenesis, prediction, and evolutionary computation.
Can the Planetary be “Governed”?
A collaboration between Berggruen Institute and Dark Matter Labs, Planetary Compendium explores how people have attempted to govern planetary-scale phenomena – forces and processes that operate across vast spatial and temporal scales – and how these efforts manifest locally. By surfacing compelling real-world and speculative cases of planetary (or proto-planetary) governance, the Compendium aims to broaden and energize our collective imagination of what’s possible.
Where can we find “relics from the future”?
The Future Wunderkammer is an interactive platform that reimagines the cabinet of curiosity for the 21st century. You will find speculative art, science, and stories that ponder the futures of life, technology, and identity. The “Future Relics” contained within are artifacts that contemplate how humanity’s relationship with the world, and with itself, might evolve.
How can capitalism be reformed to address growing inequality?
The innovations of digital capitalism, most notably AI, are divorcing productivity growth and wealth creation from employment and income, thus vastly increasing inequality — something that can only be addressed by fostering an ownership share by all in the wealth generated by intelligent machines that are displacing gainful employment — that is, predistribution via universal capital.
What will life become?
We are immersed in a time of meteoric change. Researchers are creating technoscientific objects—computational intelligences, outer space telescopes, and synthetic and virtual life forms—that call into question historical notions of what it means to be human. The Future Humans Theme hypothesizes that such phenomena demand a philosophical reordering. We ask, what will life become? One area of our research, speculative and science fiction, explores the tools that are materializing our shared future with other-than-human entities through the Vaster than Empires project.
Can we envision democratic practices and forms of political participation that extend beyond the ballot box?
More people are eligible to vote in 2024 than at any other point in history—but the shadow of authoritarianism looms over this historic moment. To meet this crisis, we are reimagining democratic institutions beyond elections by placing the citizen at the center of the democratic process.
Why ask “where is now?”
Over centuries, humans have learned to orient themselves not only in space but in time, asking “Where is now?”. This inquiry has falsified the ancient belief in an eternal universe and revealed that history does not endlessly repeat itself. We have only one shot at this. In a finite universe, unprecedented change at planetary scales is possible, but not guaranteed. Nothing is certain, nothing predestined; there’s no guarantee nor fate, for better or worse.
Our task, then, is urgent and concrete: to tend our garden, which is now the entire planet. Our interconnected world is increasingly imperiled, and novel technologies will only conjure forth further hazards and vulnerabilities. Yet fragility and freedom are sides of a coin. Whatever happens next—for terrestrial life, for tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow—will be built on decisions we make now, in our own fleeting ‘now’.
History of Now by Thomas Moynihan with with Informationart & Clinton Van Arnam
How can the search for extraterrestrial life and intelligence teach us to take better care of Earth?
By searching for life in the universe, we deepen our understanding of planetary habitability—the capacity of any planet to host life and allow it to flourish. This teaches us about the survival limits of life as we know it, as well as the kinds of alternative biospheres that may exist outside of our planet. With the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, the stakes get even higher: answers to the "Fermi paradox"—how is it possible that we have not yet detected any intelligent life in the universe full of stars—hide important cues about the conditions planetary communities must maintain to sustain the habitability of their home planet.
The Long L: Habitability in Substrate-Agnostic Ecologies by Lukáš Likavčan with ENDS
How did auto, so synonymous with self-sufficiency, come to obscure vast infrastructures of dependency and planetary coordination?
Auto comes to signify self-sufficiency through a historical and ideological sleight of hand: by locating power, motion, and decision inside discrete devices, masking the vast external systems that make those devices possible. The automobile is the perfect example of this. It signifies autonomy as it appears self-directed with either a human driver or an algorithmic one, yet it depends on planetary infrastructures, roads, oil extraction, refineries, regulations, labor systems, data networks, and ecological sacrifice, that remain largely invisible. This illusion of independence is reinforced through narratives of individual freedom, mobility, and choice, and device-centric ideas of technology, which conceal how automation actually operates as a planetary process of coordination, standardization, and path dependence. Auto obscures dependency by framing automation as self-generated action, while in reality it is sustained by deeply entrenched environmental, technical, and social platforms that extend far beyond the “self.”
What is the relationship between life and intelligence?
Life and intelligence are deeply linked. Life can be understood as a self-modifying computational state of matter that can grow, heal, and replicate itself heritably. It’s a functional definition, meaning it’s really about what life does, as opposed to what its essence is. Beyond that, life is also symbiotic: living systems immediately cooperate, forming larger-scale organisms. Intelligence shares these properties. As components coordinate—cells forming bodies, neurons forming brains—the degree of computational parallelism increases.
Intelligence is all about being able to model the world and yourself and others, and to predict how they’re going to work so that you can get on more successfully and persist through time. Under that definition, if there is a living system, it has to be intelligent.
What Is Intelligence? by by Blaise Agüera y Arcas with Practise, MK & MO
What is “Universal Basic Capital”?
It is now becoming clear that AI innovations are increasingly decoupling productivity growth and wealth creation from jobs and income. The value created by intelligent machines is flowing mostly to those who “own the robots.” In the US, the top 10% who own 93% of all equities. Meanwhile, the value of labor — and its bargaining power to reap a piece of the pie — is rapidly diminishing. Indeed, the public, whose data is exploited to train AI models, generally has no claim to the new wealth created from the raw material of their information.
A social contract that addresses this dynamic would foster an ownership share for all in the wealth generated by intelligent machines built on the public's data and that are displacing gainful employment. The aim is to enhance the assets of the general population in the first place — predistribution — instead of only seeking to patch up inequality by redistributing the income of others after the fact. We call this “universal basic capital”.
What is the difference between “Universal Basic Capital” and “Universal Basic Income”?
The return on equity shares of UBC in the AI economy will compound over time and grow in value unlike ‘universal basic income,” which is only a welfare transfer that doesn’t change the dynamic of inequality.
The idea is not only to reduce the concentration of wealth at the top, but to build it from below.
The best way to address inequality in the digital age is to broadly share the wealth by spreading the equity around. This can be done through universal savings and investment accounts that are individual or family owned.