USC Berggruen Fellowship

The Berggruen Institute seeks to encourage a deeper understanding of the great political, economic, social, and cultural transformations that are reshaping the human condition, in order to better inform practical responses. It organizes and supports inquiries that bring multicultural and interdisciplinary knowledge to questions of governance, of philosophy and culture, and of global restructuring including especially the role of China. 

To this end, USC Dornsife Center on Science, Technology and Public Life (CSTPL) and the Berggruen Institute (BI) will sponsor up to ten fellowships at the University of Southern California for the academic year 2020–21.

The selected USC Berggruen Fellows will work on projects under the Institute’s programmatic areas to study the Great Transformations: Future of Capitalism, Globalization and Geopolitics, Transformations of the Human, and the Future of Democracy. Below is the project description for Transformations of the Human. For information on the other projects and the application process please click the link here.

Transformations of the Human (ToftH)
The Transformations of the Human program is designed as a philosophical study and artistic exploration of the manifold ways in which AI and biotech challenge these established ways of thinking about ourselves as human.

Projects
ToftH has two major project streams—one concerned with AI, AI & the Human; the other with contemporary biotechnologies, Biotech & the Human, (HNT—Human, Nature, Technology). In both streams we place philosophers and artists in labs and companies, where their task is to make visible that AI and biotech are much more than technical fields: They are philosophical laboratories for reformulating what it means to be human. From the perspective of ToftH, the contemporary disruption of the human by AI and biotech is a chance to invent a whole new concept of the human, one adequate to the present, to our knowledge and our technical possibilities.

Our ambition is to feed our findings back into the production of both artificial intelligence and Biotech so that these technologies can live up to their philosophical—and human—stakes, and to thereby contribute to both human and non-human flourishing.

Future of Capitalism
While the current model of capitalism has generated unprecedented wealth, it has failed to address environmental and distributional challenges. The Future of Capitalism program seeks to envision new models and mechanisms for managing and legitimating market economies.

Globalization and Geopolitics
Globalization is both an accomplished fact and in deep crisis in the face of climate change, growing inequality, elite self-dealing, and populist backlash. The Berggruen Institute seeks to reimagine how counties governments, technologists, and global thinkers can harness globalization so that it is capable of addressing the challenges faced by both advanced and emerging countries in an interdependent, but fragmenting world.

Future of Democracy
The Future of Democracy program designs resilient systems and institutions adapted to a changing society in order to preserve liberal democracy.