A Philosophy of Planetary Computation

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Benjamin Bratton

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The Antikythera mechanism, sometimes called the “first computer,” was more than a calculator; it was also an astronomical device. Thus the birth of computation is in the orienting of intelligence to its planetary condition. From Climate Science to Synthetic Biology, this remains the case.

As computation becomes planetary infrastructure, its myriad hybrid intelligences pose new challenges to fundamental philosophical questions. How does computation become more than a mere technology, but also the medium through which we ask existential questions about who, what and how we are?

Perhaps the most decisive impact of planetary computation will not be in what it does as a tool, but as an epistemological technology: what it discloses to sapient intelligence about how the world works. This in turn alters how intelligence remakes the world, including the ongoing artificialization of intelligence, life, sensation, and ecosystems.

This talk will explore these issues in relation to the work of the Antikythera think-tank and its research on cognitive infrastructures, recursive simulations, hemispherical stacks, planetary sapience, and more.

There are moments in history when ideas of what may be possible are ahead of what is technically feasible, but there are other moments when technologies outpace our concepts available to orient them. What is the philosophical school of thought most appropriate to this reality?

Benjamin Bratton is Professor of Philosophy of Technology and Speculative Design at University of California, San Diego. He is also Director of Antikythera, an cross-disciplinary think-tank researching the philosophy of computation supported by Berggruen Institute, and Visiting Faculty Researcher in Google's Paradigms of Intelligence group. He is the author of several books including (MIT Press, 2015), (Strelka Press, 2019), and (Verso, 2020). His current book projects deal with the history of planetary technologies, the evolutionary paradox of intelligence, a formal theory of artificialization, and the paradigmatic conjunction of biology and technology.

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