PERSON
Bing Song
The philosopher and Berggruen Institute leader who has spent a decade arguing that the global AI conversation is philosophically provincial—conducted almost entirely within liberal Western assumptions that the Chinese classical traditions of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhist thought are uniquely positioned to correct—and that the deepest AI risk is not misalignment but the intelligence-without-wisdom that a civilization amplifies when it builds in the image of its shallower self.
Bing Song is the President of the Berggruen Institute, the founding director of its China Center, and the architect of a sustained philosophical conversation between Chinese classical thought and artificial intelligence that has been underway since 2017. She edited
Intelligence and Wisdom: Artificial Intelligence Meets Chinese Philosophers (2021), the first systematic engagement by major Chinese philosophers with AI's civilizational implications, and co-authored
Gongsheng Across Contexts: A Philosophy of Co-Becoming (2024), which develops the concept of gongsheng—mutually embedded, co-constituting, co-becoming entities—as a framework for thinking about human-AI relationship at planetary scale. Her argument is not that the Chinese tradition is simply correct and the Western tradition simply wrong; it is that the problems posed by
large language models and advanced AI are large enough to require resources from multiple philosophical