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 engages 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, and how speculative inquiry reshapes understanding in the present.

Future Humans is directed by Claire Isabel Webb, historian and philosopher of science, whose work bridges the history of science, speculative research, and experimental storytelling. Her research examines how scientists have historically imagined, modeled, and anticipated nonhuman and extraterrestrial life—and how those practices shape contemporary encounters with novel forms of life.

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
An interdisciplinary collaboration using scientific modeling and radical imagination to explore speculative yet plausible exoplanetary worlds and rethink assumptions about life beyond Earth.

Future Wunderkammer
An interdisciplinary project using speculative artifacts to explore how emerging technologies, ecological change, and new forms of intelligence are reshaping how life is understood in the present.

Vaster Than Empires
An interdisciplinary 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 and future of subjective experience.