A global network of thinkers navigating change through ideas
what we do
We develop new conceptual frameworks to meet the challenges & harness the opportunities of the arriving future
Our work forges new frameworks of thought in democracy, capitalism, planetary politics, science and technology, and philosophy and culture. We foster dialogue between East and West, and develop shared perspectives for our world. Our goal is to create a planetary network of thinkers from diverse disciplines and cultures. We believe these thinkers—connected and emboldened—can reshape our social and political institutions, and drive solutions to some of the biggest challenges of our time.
featured
Berggruen Prize Essay Competition
Berggruen Prize Essay Competition Announces 2025 Winners
Berggruen Institute China
Berggruen Institute China 2025 Annual Report
The Planetary
Explore the Planetary Compendium
Berggruen Prize
Michael Sandel Announced as 2025 Berggruen Prize Laureate
Noema
Introducing Noema VI: Paradigm Shifts
Studio B.
Introducing Futurology: Berggruen Institute’s Debut Podcast on What’s Next
Berggruen Institute Europe
Collana dei Tre Oci Series Launch
Future Humans
Discover Proxima Kósmos, a speculative exploration of life beyond earth
Future Humans
Enter the Future Wunderkammer
featured
Berggruen Prize Essay Competition
Berggruen Prize Essay Competition Announces 2025 Winners
Berggruen Institute China
Berggruen Institute China 2025 Annual Report
The Planetary
Explore the Planetary Compendium
Berggruen Prize
Michael Sandel Announced as 2025 Berggruen Prize Laureate
Noema
Introducing Noema VI: Paradigm Shifts
Studio B.
Introducing Futurology: Berggruen Institute’s Debut Podcast on What’s Next
Berggruen Institute Europe
Collana dei Tre Oci Series Launch
Future Humans
Discover Proxima Kósmos, a speculative exploration of life beyond earth
Future Humans
Enter the Future Wunderkammer
our themes
Renovating Democracy
Bringing together public leaders and thinkers, the Renovating Democracy theme is reimagining democratic institutions to meet the challenges of the 21st century, placing the citizen at the center of the democratic process.
Explore
Universal Capital
Global capitalism is the dominant form of economic organization but is unable to address problems such as climate change, wealth inequality, and financial and price instability. Our work in this area develops and implements cutting-edge thinking designed to address these failures of capitalism’s institutional architecture.
Explore
Future Humans
Future Humans connects experimenters, creators, and scholars who are shaping how humans of the future will collaborate with natures and technologies. At the center of these projects is a crucial question: What will life become?
Explore
The Planetary
We are entering a new era, in which our most pressing challenges exceed the narrow concerns of human beings. These challenges call for a conceptual break with traditional human-centered understandings of the world and its politics, toward processes and institutions that are planetary in scale and scope.
Explore
Antikythera
Antikythera is a research and development organization reorienting planetary computation as a philosophical, technological, and geopolitical force. Directed by Philosopher of Technology, Benjamin Bratton, and incubated by the Berggruen Institute, Antikythera produces new philosophies of technology through design studios, salons, and productions that orbit around five core research themes–Synthetic Intelligence, Recursive Simulation, Synthetic Catallaxy, Hemispherical Stacks, and Planetary Sapience.
ExploreAntikythera Journal
Antikythera: A new philosophy of computation that links an evolutionary perspective on technology, and the emergence of planetary computation in particular, with a generative program for how to orient it as it parents us.
In the News
December 16, 2025
Berggruen Institute's Studio B Featured in the Hollywood Reporter with Launch of Creators Coalition on AIThe Hollywood Reporter
October 31, 2025
Nicolas Berggruen's Op-Ed in Financial Times, "Universal basic capital would create a fair AI economy"Financial Times
October 16, 2025
Nathan Gardels at Digital Rerum Novarum: Artificial Intelligence for Peace, Social Justice, and Integral Human DevelopmentPontifical Academy of Social Sciences, Vatican City
ANIMATING Questions
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.
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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’.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
Watch & learn
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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Learn moreWhat would governance look like if our profound integration in Earth’s planetary systems was central to our politics?
The Planetary Program works to place the fact that we live on a planet – which enables and constrains all life – at the center of politics. We are developing a new conceptual vocabulary to help envision Earth as a political space that can be governed for the benefit of life.
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Should human and machine intelligence be “aligned,” or would that prevent new possibilities and ensure dangerous outcomes?
To strongly align AI to human values presumes that anthropocentric mirroring is the best guarantee of viable futures, but what if this is based on faulty presumptions about what human values actually are and what the evolution of intelligence really means?
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Berggruen Institute Concentration
The L.A. Wildfires
Upcoming & Ongoing Events
February 10, 2026
What Is a ‘World Order’? (And What Would a Planetary One Look Like?) with Nils GilmanVienna, Austria
Our Centers
Los Angeles
Los Angeles is a place where innovation and diversity are celebrated, and where far-reaching ideas are given a chance to take root. The city is uniquely suited to be the headquarters for the Berggruen Institute, where the world’s best minds will study the most pressing issues of our time.
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Venice
Europe’s exposure to the limits of the nation state makes it a unique laboratory to explore our planetary future. The Berggruen Institute Europe attracts philosophers and political thinkers, artists and architects, scientists and technologists, to develop and promote long-term answers to the main challenges of the 21st century by developing ideas that emerge from Europe and address the world.
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Beijing
Established in December 2018, the Berggruen China Center is located at the heart of Peking University. The Center engages with outstanding thinkers on its global platform to examine, share, and develop ideas to address planetary challenges in times of profound great transformation. Intellectual themes for research programs are focused on frontier science, technology, and philosophy; Creative Futures; and Ancient Wisdom and Planetary Governance. The Center funds a fellowship program, supports publications that feature its major research focuses, hosts programs activities such as lectures, workshops, and symposia, and produces multi-media outreach programs.
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