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Planetary Sapience
The evolutionary emergence of natural and artificial intelligence, and the conception and composition of viable planetary systems
The evolution of sapience has been a chief driver of the conditions that now make its future precarious
Planetary Sapience in NOEMA
Planetary Sapience is the most philosophical of Antikythera’s research areas. This research theme asks fundamental questions about the past and futures of intelligence, evolution, knowledge, and artificiality as seen through the lens of planetary computation.
Planetary Sapience convenes philosophers, scientists, and technologists around (1) the role of computation in the ongoing discovery of ‘the planetary’ as the precondition of evolved intelligence and (2) the emergence of computational intelligence as part of that evolution and its potential role in fashioning viable planetary futures.
For example, the scientific idea of “climate change” is an epistemological accomplishment of planetary computation. Without the satellites, sensors and, most of all, supercomputing simulations of climate past, present and contingent futures, the holistic view of planetary systems and anthropogenic transformation would be impossible.
The philosophical implications are profound. As an understanding of the impact of long term human agency on ecological systems, the Anthropocene hypothesis is an interpretation of the reality that planetary computation has clarified. The response recognizes the capability and the responsibility to compose viable planetary futures. The proper response to anthropogenic climate change must be equally anthropogenic.
Different kinds of tools make ideas possible. It is not just that they invite different dispositions toward the world, they literally make the world perceivable and conceivable in ways otherwise impossible.
Some technologies realize their impact in what they do and how as tools they enable artificial transformation of the world. Others, however, have greater impact in what they reveal about how the world works. Telescopes and microscopes are examples: yes, they allow perception of the very large and very small, but more importantly they enable Copernican shifts in self-comprehension, grasping our very selves as part of planetary conditions. With such shifts it was possible to orient not only where the planet is but thereby where (and when, and what, we are). Taken together, these may be called epistemological technologies.
It is certain that computation is artificially transforming the world, in the form of an accidental megastructure that shifts politics, economics and cultures in its image. However, computation is also an epistemological technology that has, does and will reorient the course of what a viable planetary condition may be.
Zooming out to deep time scales, we see that a planet may fold its matter in certain ways that are able to perform feats of cognition, and we know that Earth is at least one such planet. Intelligence not only happens on a planet, it is something a planet does. To even pose this claim is the result of billions of years of intelligence scaffolding and planetary matter-folding. From cells to organs to machines, the principle is no less true for artificial computational intelligence than it is for human intelligence.
Given this, Planetary Sapience asks what should be the place of computation in the ongoing evolution of intelligence as a planetary phenomenon? This is defined ot only as intelligence operating at global scale through planetary scale technologies, but an understanding that intelligence emerges through the scaffolding of increasingly complex forms, some of which are only now computational.
Antikythera’s Planetary Sapience research provides a new conceptual frame with which to engage with futures for planetary computation that alter how we understand ourselves, the planet to which we belong and, indeed, the universe to which that planet belongs.
Antikythera focuses on several emerging areas of Planetary Sapience research:
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Planetary sensing, modeling, and simulation
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Philosophy of technology as both evolved and artificial Form
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AI and Scientific Epistemology
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Philosophy of Astrobiology
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The ‘Anthropocene’ and the ‘Post-Anthropocene’
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Boundaries and preconditions of planetary viability
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Scientific cosmology as cultural cosmology
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Applied Astrobiology
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Theory of Metahistory
Further
Antikythera at MIT
Events at MIT Media Lab
October 23rd – 25th 2024
Antikythera: A Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation
As computation becomes planetary infrastructure, how does its acceleration of hybrid intelligences pose new challenges to fundamental philosophical questions? As machine sensing, machine cognition, machine embodiment co-evolve, how does computation become more than a mere technology, but the medium through which we ask existential questions about who, what and how we are?
Benjamin Bratton’s keynote lecture features Antikythera’s philosophy of technology and the speculative design work of the think tank. Antikythera is building a new school of thought by integrating work from computer science, astrobiology, intellectual history, science-fiction, architecture, automation theory, and more. The lecture reviews the core research themes of the program: planetary computation, synthetic intelligence, recursive simulations, hemispherical stacks, and planetary sapience and shares glimpses of the content and ideas behind Antikythera’s forthcoming digital journal with MIT Press.
Planetary Sapience
Planetary Sapience, one of Antikythera’s core research themes, asks not only what planetary computation can do, but also, with great optimism, what it is for? Planetary sapience is defined as the long and arguably accelerating evolutionary process by which the Earth folds itself into myriad intelligent forms –biological and now also mineral– through which it comes to grasp essential and even existential realities about itself, from its own age to its climatic metabolisms and processes. Humanity is an expression of planetary sapience but not its sole medium.
That evolution has been fraught in ways we are only now coming to terms with. Sapience evolved through the violent evolutionary history of human biological and technological intelligence. The paradoxes are severe.
Today planetary sapience, ‘'wakes up' at a moment it comes to realize that the consequences of its own emergence (such as anthropogenic climate change) are what puts its own continuance in jeopardy. Complex abstract technological intelligence grasps its own evolution but wakes up in a house of fire, burning largely because of its awakening and enlightenment.
How must it reorient itself so that its long term viability is more ensured? What is the role of planetary computation in diagnosing, modeling and addressing those futures?
In our lifetimes, computational technologies have been the primary means by which planetary sapience conceives of and instrumentalizes itself. It has become both the medium through which complex intelligence thinks and how it acts. For a speculative philosophy of technology, this suggests that the purpose of planetary computation may reside as much in what it discloses to intelligence to itself, including through the artificialization of intelligence, than in what it does as a mere tool, albeit one with earth-shaking significance.
Planetary Sapience assembles many of Antikythera’s inaugural journal contributors to discuss the themes of planetary intelligence. The symposium will preview many of the exciting contributions launching officially in Spring 2025.
Symposium speakers include:
Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Google Paradigms of Intelligence; Computer Science and AI
Benjamin Bratton, Antikythera and UC San Diego; Philosophy of Technology
Peter Galison, Harvard Black Hole Initiative; Physics and History of Science
N. Katherine Hayles, UCLA; Comparative Literature
Xin Liu, London; Art and Technology
Nicholas de Monchaux, MIT; Architecture
Thomas Moynihan, University of Cambridge; Intellectual History
Dava Newman, MIT Media Lab; Space Science
Robert Pietrusko, University of Pennsylvania; Landscape Architecture
Stephanie Sherman, Central St. Martins, UAL; Speculative Design
Sara Walker, Santa Fe Institute and ASU; Physics and Astrobiology
