Why Study Intelligence Now?
Countless traditions over millennia have viewed humans as the pinnacle and center of the intelligent universe. As current science and scholarship yield a more subtle understanding of biological intelligence from cells to plants to animals, as complexity theorists illuminate collective intelligences from bee swarms to social networks to entire societies, and as machine intelligence develops powers outstripping our own, we confront a set of questions. What do we mean by intelligence in the first place? Is there anything unique about human intelligence? What if the story of intelligence does not culminate with us? Is the world of intelligences vaster, more varied, and more wonderful than we ever imagined? Might intelligence be written into the fabric of reality itself?
Starting in 2026, the John Templeton Foundation will award over $60 million in grants focused on such questions across our six funding areas. Grants will be distributed over three years to philosophers and ethicists, biologists and neuroscientists, physicists and computer scientists and more, to explore these questions in a multidisciplinary and multidimensional manner. Grantees accepted into the Future of Intelligence venture will have opportunities to connect with peer scientists and scholars across an array of fields to generate new insights and advance our understanding of what it means to be intelligent.
The Story of Intelligence
Human civilizations have explored many ways of understanding the meaning and significance of intelligence and its place in the human story. How have philosophical and religious traditions understood intelligence historically, and how are they making sense of intelligence today? What is the relationship between intelligence and related concepts such as adaptive behavior, agency, consciousness, sentience, and personhood? How is our shared imagination of intelligence shaped even now by literature, film, and other media?
The Diversity of Intelligence
Recent years have seen astonishing advances in our understanding of cellular and basal intelligence, animal language and cognition, and augmented and artificial intelligences. What are we learning at the frontiers of scientific research about the dazzling profusion of forms intelligence might take? What might be held in common, and how might we understand the humanity of human intelligence, amid the ferment of intelligence all around us?
The Plurality of Intelligence
From bee colony collaboration to bird murmuration to forest communication systems, from social networks to prediction markets to digital democratic ecosystems, collectives can show emergent capacities and properties that go beyond what individuals possess. How is intelligence shared, distributed, and amplified across pluralities? What conditions lead to healthy function, and dysfunction, across collective brains? What does collective intelligence look like not only among a single kind of intelligence, but across different types and species?
The Future of Intelligence
Some believe artificial superintelligence will accelerate our progress, eliminate disease, and unleash abundance and creativity. Others believe it will sentence humankind to conflict, irrelevance, and extinction. Still others look to brain-machine interfaces and genetic manipulation to extend the powers of our own cognition. Whether you believe we should hit the accelerator or decelerator, whose hand should be on the wheel? How do we design a future of flourishing and wisdom for augmented, enhanced, and shared intelligence?
