“How will future humans interact with artificial others?”—Claire Webb

Claire Webb, who leads the Future Humans Program at the Berggruen Institute, posed the above question during our Summit 2023, then went on to discuss how the emergence of other-than-biological phenomena suggests we should radically rethink concepts of consciousness, intelligence, agency—and liveliness itself.

Among these “embodied machines,” which blur the notions of biological and mechanical, are algorithms that can be made to “learn”; brain machine interfaces that hint to a future of qualia exchange; and xenobots (“strange robots”)—a programmable synthetic life form.

“I think that xenobots pose fundamental questions about futures of life, and also the possibility to really collaborate with machines to create new forms of life that are themselves between the biological and the mechanical,” Webb said.