Society & Culture

Futurology

by Berggruen Institute

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Latest episodes

How the UN Stopped World War III (with Shashi Tharoor and Nathan Gardels)

October 22, 2026 · 47 min

Hypocrisy, the old line goes, is the tribute vice pays to virtue. For eighty years, the powerful at least bothered to pay it, citing human rights, national security, and democracy as reasons for starting wars and undercutting liberties…
There's No Mystery About AI Consciousness (with Geoffrey Lee and Grant Slater)

October 15, 2026 · 1 hr 17 min

Machines are starting to act like humans. Does that mean they’re conscious? The problem is we haven’t been able to prove how or why humans are conscious yet either. So why would we be able to offer any answers about AI? In this episode…
Multispecies Democracy Now! (with Jonathon Keats and Grant Slater)

October 6, 2026 · 1 hr 37 min

Democracy counts people, not plants. Humans are only a sliver of life on this planet, but today, we're the only ones who get a vote. What if we gave rights to rivers and standing to trees? In this episode, experimental philosopher…
Let AI Have Intelligence. We’ll Keep Wisdom. (with Arianna Huffington and Dawn Nakagawa)

September 29, 2026 · 1 hr 5 min

Somewhere around the Enlightenment we decided that thinking was what made us human. We built our schools, careers, and sense of worth at the altar of intelligence. Now machines are passing us on that rubric, which leaves two possibilities…
Are We Posthuman? (with N. Katherine Hayles and Claire Webb)

September 17, 2026 · 1 hr 8 min

Relying on machines to coordinate our lives was just one step toward decentering humanity’s role in the world. Flights, banking, trade, food production... But as we start merging our actual decision-making with digital entities, exactly…

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God Is In the Machine (with Kevin Kelly and Nils Gilman)

September 9, 2026 · 1 hr 40 min

Technologists have feared (or prayed for) the singularity as a rapture-like inevitability for nearly 70 years. In an instant, they believed, our machine intelligence will overtake us and race ahead. Kevin Kelly says that moment has passed…
Gamble on Anything. Except Murder. (with Bobby Allyn and Grant Slater)

August 18, 2026 · 1 hr 17 min

With prediction markets, gambling has gone ambient. To place your bets, you don't need to visit a casino floor, a racetrack, or your corner bookie. Now any uncertain thing on Earth could be the next big short. Wildfires, missile strikes…
There's No Such Thing as a Free Agent (with Gillian Tett and Dawn Nakagawa)

August 11, 2026 · 1 hr 8 min

One value proposition of AI is a personalized assistant at your fingertips. Every Average Joe can now have a “pocket pixie," the kind of perk once reserved for Hollywood stars and high-powered CEOs. But that promise rests on a convenient…
We're Winning the Race to Replace Ourselves (with Tristan Harris and Dawn Nakagawa)

August 4, 2026 · 52 min

The people racing to build artificial general intelligence tell us this rush to the future is inevitable. It reads like a forecast, but works like an alibi. If nothing can stop the race, then no one driving it is responsible for where it…
Is It Awareness All the Way Down? (with Annaka Harris and Grant Slater)

July 30, 2026 · 2 hr 8 min

Science studies the world from the outside. But for thousands of years, meditators have been running a different experiment: sit still, pay close attention, and watch what reality does. The results of those experiments can feel…
Can We Move Fast and Fix Things? (with Reid Hoffman and Dawn Nakagawa)

July 21, 2026 · 1 hr 5 min

For 20 years, Silicon Valley's operating creed was 'move fast and break things'; the wreckage was the price of inventing the future. Today, we live amid that wreckage: institutions built for the last century, trust in freefall, and…
The AI CEOs Are Terrified of Themselves (with Stuart Russell and Nils Gilman)

July 14, 2026 · 1 hr 24 min

This year, two powerful AI CEOs said they want to stop building it and will… if everyone else agrees to stop too. Yet they race ahead with stock market valuations premised on making millions of workers redundant. If you wanted to stoke a…

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About the show

The future never arrives all at once. It ripples through society long before we know what to call it. At the Berggruen Institute, we know that we need more than prediction to name what’s next; we need invention. Each week, Institute President Dawn Nakagawa 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. Join thinkers and doers from the Berggruen-verse as we imagine a future that we can accomplish together, instead of one that we’re all working to prevent.