Event

Neither Human nor Machine: On the In-Betweenness of AI

Date: April 3, 2026
Location: CITIC Bookstore at Genesis Beijing
Discussion: 6:30–8pm
Language: English, with machine translation available

Event is free but registration required. Click here to register.

Click here for livestream (or Berggruen Institute’s WeChat channels)

For centuries, we believed the distinction was clear: humans think, machines calculate. Artificial intelligence unsettles this certainty. These systems are neither human minds nor mere tools—they occupy a strange in-between. This talk asks what it means to encounter a form of intelligence that escapes the categories through which modern thought has understood both the human and the machine.

Speaker

Tobias Rees

Founder, Limn

Tobias Rees is the founder of limn, an R&D studio located at the intersection of philosophy, art and technology. He is also a senior fellow of Schmidt Sciences’ AI2050 initiative and a senior visiting fellow at Google. Rees was the founding Director of the Berggruen Institute’s Transformations of the Human Program. He also serves as Reid Hoffman Professor of Humanities at the New School for Social Research and is a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

Commentator

Zhan Yiwen

Associate Professor of Philosophy, Beijing Normal University

Zhan’s research concerns bounded rationality, processes of inquiry, and agent-relative perspectives in epistemology and decision theory, as well as modality and applications of plural logic in metaphysics. He also works on philosophical foundations of generative AI.

About The Berggruen Institute

The Berggruen Institute’s mission is to develop foundational ideas and shape political, economic, and social institutions for the 21st century. Providing critical analysis using an outwardly expansive and purposeful network, we bring together some of the best minds and most authoritative voices from across cultural and political boundaries to explore fundamental questions of our time. Our objective is enduring impact on the progress and direction of societies around the world.