It has come as a shock to some AI researchers that a large neural net that predicts next words seems to produce a system with general intelligence. Yet this is consistent with a long-held view among some neuroscientists that the brain evolved precisely to predict the future—the “predictive brain” hypothesis. In What Is Intelligence?, Blaise Agüera y Arcas takes up this idea—that prediction is fundamental not only to intelligence and the brain but to life itself—and explores the wide-ranging implications.

Accept All Cookies by Benjamin Bratton is a collection of key concepts in the philosophy of planetary computation, evolution, and intelligence. This book features pointed provocations on synthetic intelligence, artificial computation, recursive simulations, the geopolitics of stack systems, and the paradoxical relationships between planetary intelligence and transformation. The 100+ concise catalysts for deliberation are drawn from the ideas and research that has emerged from Antikythera’s programs.

What life is, and how its essence can be understood as computation that grows more complex over time in symbiotic relationships.

In 1944, quantum mechanics pioneer Erwin Schrödinger wrote a slim but influential volume, What Is Life?, posing the primary question that rendered biology so mysterious to a physicist. How can life and all its attendant complexities come to exist in a random universe, governed by simple laws, whose disorder only increases over time?

The Noocene features selections from Antikythera’s archive presented as a generative cinematic matrix overlaid with key concepts from the school of thought.