Futurology

Artificial intelligence isn’t alive. But our belief that it is may be the most dangerous illusion of all. Tech leaders talk about AI as if it thinks for itself. But that fantasy hides a more nuanced story about people, power, and profit. In this episode of Futurology, musician and technologist Jaron Lanier joins Futurology Producer Grant Slater to explain why treating AI as a creature, rather than...

For the first time in human history, we can see other worlds. Nearly six thousand planets have been discovered orbiting distant stars — and more appear every year. Each one is a reminder that Earth is not unique, and humanity is not the center. Astrophysicist and astrobiologist Adam Frank joins Claire Webb to talk about what this means for science and for us. From NASA’s search for technosignature...

The first machines mimicked our muscles. Today, they’ve learned to mirror our minds. Now they’re beginning to imitate something even closer to the core of our humanity – imagination itself. Sci-fi author, translator, and technologist Ken Liu calls this new medium the Noematagraph: a tool for capturing creativity and collaborating with AI in the same way cinema tells stories with actors, sound and...

Humanity has a deep time problem. Our internal clock simply cannot compute on a time scale that takes into account the rise and fall of civilizations, star systems, and superintelligences. Unable to fathom consequences beyond our chronology, we make decisions and take actions that could snuff out our species in a blinding flash of light that would barely merit mention on the cosmic timeline. Ross...

In 2014, the breakthrough Human Microbiome Project confirmed that – within our own bodies – we are outnumbered. For every human cell, there are three bacterial microbes residing in our gut and throughout what we long considered solid and singular self. This discovery severed the final remaining links in the Great Chain of Being, a persistent mythology from antiquity that cast humans as higher than...

We live in a culture hooked on speed and certainty. Hot takes, quick fixes, and algorithms that claim to know us better than we know ourselves. Yet despite all the information at our fingertips, the world seems to make less sense by the day. In this episode, renowned travel writer Pico Iyer describes how globalization – which offered up the mirage of a global monoculture – has instead led to a cla...

Each and every image of the cosmos is an act of interpretation. Scientists collaborate with artists and illustrators to saturate the colorless data of distant nebulae and galaxies and invoke awe. They rotate images, signalling which way is up in a void where ‘up’ does not exist. They make up for the shortcomings of our perception with the power of our imagination. In this episode, space historian...

For decades, world leaders told us that global trade would keep the peace. Markets would bind nations together, and economic interdependence would make conflict too costly to pursue. That logic shaped the global institutions of the late twentieth century and defined the worldview of Pascal Lamy, former head of the World Trade Organization. In this episode, Lamy sits down with Lorenzo Marsili, the...

The Berggruen Institute began with a simple conviction: ideas shape the world. Out of the wreckage of the 2008 financial crisis,the Institute's co-founders – Nicolas Berggruen and Nathan Gardels – set out to build an independent think tank that would imagine bold, new futures, bridge cultures, and redesign institutions to match the pace of the 21st century. Beyond just thinking about these ideas,...

The liberal world order was built for a different era — more centralized, more hierarchical, more predictable. In the 21st century, power has gone fluid. It flows through supply chains and satellites, networks and platforms, alliances that shift issue by issue. In this episode, policy thinker Anne-Marie Slaughter joins Nathan Gardels to map a world no longer defined by blocs, but by webs. From cli...

The ever-branching network of lakes, rivers, and streams that flow west from the Rockies enable human life to flourish in one of the hottest places on Earth. This is a “cyborg watershed” – part natural, part machine, and wholly entangled with the myths and machinery of the region. In this episode, LA-based artist Lauren Bon joins Futurology producer Grant Slater to trace the path of her large-scal...

The modern nation-state wasn’t just a conglomeration of laws and armies. It was a belief in borders, in belonging, in the promise that citizenship could ground identity in a chaotic world. That belief is faltering. In this episode, writer and thinker Rana Dasgupta joins Jonathan Blake to explore the spiritual and political collapse of state power. They unearth sovereignty's theological roots, asse...

For most of human history, the end of the world was a divine promise, inevitable and liberating for the holy alone. But the invention of extinction changed that. This was no prophecy. It was discovery – a realization that the universe could go on without us – and probably would. In this episode, philosopher Thomas Moynihan joins Benjamin Bratton to trace the history of a shift in thinking: that th...

In the 21st century, Silicon Valley has coded into existence a vast memetic machinery — a self-replicating ecosystem of feedback loops, default settings, and algorithms now steering society at scale. Increasingly, it appears this emergent cyberocracy no longer wants to disrupt the world, but to govern it. In this episode, veteran journalist John Markoff teases out novel strands of thought that are...

On America’s 250th birthday, historian Niall Ferguson suggests that the US has reached an age when most republics fizzle out. Donald Trump’s rise is merely a symptom of this late-stage unspooling of an empire that America could never quite escape. In this episode, Ferguson tells the story of a republic that burns hot, forgets fast, and could smolder on the ash heap of history sooner than we expect...

Stephen Batchelor has spent decades stripping Buddhism of its dogma to find what wisdom it can offer the modern world. Could cities and countries run on karma instead of capital? In this episode, he sketches a vision of society grounded in awareness, compassion, and radical interdependence — a politics of presence rather than power. Stripped of its cosmologies, he argues, a secular Buddhism could...

Before robots can act, they need to know where they are. That’s the deceptively simple premise behind the latest effort from machine vision pioneer Fei-Fei Li. She's building a Large World Model that will enable artificial intelligences to situate themselves in our reality and create entirely new worlds of their own, for human minds to inhabit. In this episode, we trace the evolution of artificial...

If we ever land on another planet, we won’t be the first to arrive. It will be our machines — the ones we’ve trained, calibrated, and loaded onto rockets – who will roam alien landscapes. In this episode, NASA roboticist Vandi Verma takes us inside the mind of a Mars rover — and into the process of building, steering, and co-evolving with machines that learn as they go. As we aim for unwelcoming p...

More than three decades ago, Francis Fukuyama saw the future: a world order that looked inevitable, stable, liberal. What emerged instead is something bumpier, louder, and far more dangerous. In this episode, Fukuyama takes us on a ride through the strange resurrection of 19th-century power politics, the rise of political strongmen, and the collapse of trust that can dooms institutions to failure....

Futurology is a new a weekly podcast from the Berggruen Institute where we work to name what’s next. Join us as we imagine a future we can accomplish together, instead of one we must all work to prevent.