Nils Gilman

Vice-president for programs at the Berggruen Institute — an independent, non-partisan think tank in the US.

These technologies should allow us to live longer and healthier lives, but will we deploy them in ways that also allow us to live more harmoniously?”

We stand on the cusp of a revolution, the engineers tell us. New gene-editing techniques, especially in combination with AI technologies, promise unprecedented new capacities to manipulate biological nature — including human nature itself. The potential could hardly be greater: Whole categories of disease conquered, radically personalised medicine and drastically extended mental and physical prowess.

But now the AI engineers are designing machines that they say will think, sense, feel, cogitate and reflect, and even have a sense of self. Bioengineers are contending that bacteria, plants, animals and even humans can be radically remade and modified.

The questions posed by the experiments are the most profound possible. Will we use these technologies to better ourselves or to divide or even destroy humanity? These technologies should allow us to live longer and healthier lives, but will we deploy them in ways that also allow us to live more harmoniously with each other? Who will have decision rights over how these technologies are distributed and deployed? Just a few people? Just a few countries?

To address these questions, the Berggruen Institute is building transnational networks of philosophers + technologists + policymakers + artists who are thinking about how AI and gene-editing are transfiguring what it means to be human. We seek to develop tools for navigating the most fundamental questions: Not just about what sort of world we can build, but what sort of world we should build — and also avoid building.