Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine. He is also the co-founder of and a senior adviser to the Berggruen Institute.
The world emerging before our eyes appears both as a wholly unfamiliar rupture from patterns of the past that could frame a reassuring narrative going forward — while also promising new possibilities never before imagined.
Prodigious leaps in technology, science, productive capacity and planetary interconnectedness herald a future that humanity has only dreamed of in the past. Yet these great transformations underway seem to have triggered in their wake a great political and cultural reaction among the multitudes they have bypassed or threaten to uproot. One is a condition of the other.
What is clear is that history is fast approaching an inflection point. We live either on the cusp of an entirely new era or on the brink of a return to an all-too-familiar, regressive and darker past.
From the tumultuous realm of geopolitical conflict to the roiling culture wars, the advent of intelligent machines and the capacity to redesign the human genome, a new Age of Upheaval is clearly upon us.
To help navigate the perilous and promising rapids of oncoming times, the Berggruen Institute has launched a new podcast: Futurology. This weekly series complements Noema in seeking out cutting-edge minds on the frontiers of change, looking to define the paradigm shifts that will help make sense of the world we are entering and figure out how to dwell in it.
The first episodes of the Futurology podcast illustrate its scope and breadth. You can find them on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts.
Contemplating the extreme polarization in America these days, historian Niall Ferguson thinks the country is entering a “late republic stage” like the last days of the Roman Republic before it lapsed into an empire. Francis Fukuyama sees not the end of history, but the return to 19th-century-type spheres of influence among the great powers. Stateswoman Anne-Marie Slaughter envisions a more fluid world order with networks of the willing and middle powers playing a key role.
The so-called “godmother of AI,” Fei-Fei Li, argues it is up to us humans to put robots in their place and control them before they control us. Vandi Verman, the Jet Propulsion Lab scientist who guided the Mars Rover expedition, discusses how robots will be the ambassadors of the human species on other planets. John Markoff, the chronicler of the rise of Silicon Valley, worries about the new “cyberocracy” that is coming to dominate all of society. Thomas Moynihan fleshes out the philosophical implications of discovering that we humans are on a course to our own extinction. Indian novelist Rana Dasgupta ponders the contradiction that the “nation-state” is both obsolete — and experiencing a revival. Scholar Stephen Batchelor wonders what the world would be like if governed by Buddhists.
In the most recent episode of Futurology out this week, Nicolas Berggruen and I recount the origins of the Institute and our various projects over the last decade, from “The Think Long Committee” for California to our 21st Century Council meetings in Beijing with Chinese President Xi Jinping. We trace the evolution of the “three Ps” that are the programmatic core of the Institute’s work: planetary realism, pre-distribution of wealth through universal basic capital and participation without populism.
Upcoming episodes will also include the literary journalist Pico Iyer on how the world he has so relentlessly traveled is less connected today than when he wrote “Video Night in Kathmandu” nearly 40 years ago, and philosopher David Chalmers on solving “the hard problem” of determining the origins of consciousness.
Each podcast is introduced by Berggruen Institute President Dawn Nakagawa. You can tune in every Tuesday here.
