John Ochsendorf

Morning everyone. Welcome to the Media Lab at MIT. This is a really exciting day we have in store for you, and it's the result of a big collaboration with a lot of different units at MIT and especially with the Berggruen Institute. We're really excited to partner with them and in particular I want to highlight MIT Architecture who's been a partner in developing this and the MIT Press.

Many of you know we have elements of design across all of MIT and yet there's a lot more we can do to work together. By partnering with the Berggruen Institute, we're really excited to bring the types of critical conversations, how we're going to tackle massive challenges on this Spaceship Earth and how we're going to bring people together from different disciplines to figure out how to get there.

I want to very quickly say thank you to the team from Berggruen. We'd love to do more programs with you because you made it very easy, especially Nicolay, Stephanie, Haley, Tatiana and we're joined by the president Dawn Nakagawa.

Just a quick word about Morningside Academy for Design and what we're doing at MIT. Our acronym is MAD and we're trying to be disruptive as well as collaborative force for bringing together design voices. Today's program really highlights exactly that. Please look us up at design.mit.edu, follow what we're doing. If you see ways we can partner together, we'd love to work with you. We've done a lot with the MIT Museum, the Media Lab, MIT Press and MIT Architecture especially, so we're excited to keep doing this type of program in the future.

Without further ado, I know you're all here to listen to our distinguished panels and I'd like to invite our first panel and also the moderator Benjamin Bratton. Many of you know Benjamin is the director of Antikythera at the Berggruen Institute, but he also has the best title ever: Professor of Philosophy of Technology and Speculative Design—and I can't imagine anything more that we need right now—at UC San Diego, of course.

Please join me in welcoming Benjamin and our first panel and let's have a great day.

Benjamin Bratton

Hi everyone. Thank you John very much for me for the gracious introduction and thank you all for joining us here today.

I know many of you came on Wednesday as well and those of you who did know a lot more about the Antikythera program than maybe you had anticipated.

Today is my chance to step aside and let you meet some of the voices and thinkers and designers and makers who make up the school of thought of the Antikythera program and to let you listen into the conversations that really constitute the basis of the discourse.

I'm gonna do a quick introduction to what Antikythera is about as a program and then introduce the theme of today's event—Planetary Sapience—and what we mean by that and what we think is at stake for this idea.

I'll introduce our panelists and then we'll begin.

As John already mentioned, we’re very grateful to our many supporters and collaborators in this ongoing initiative.

So first, the name Antikythera, where does this come from? It is named after this little device, Antikythera Mechanism, apocryphally understood as the first computer. It was from the second century BC, discovered in 1901,and it took a long time to figure out what it was and how it worked because it was so anomalous in the evolution of technology as a kind of mechanism.

Why is it important for us? Not only because it was sort of a beginning point, but because it was not only a calculative device, it was also an astronomical device.It allowed you to map and model the past, present, or future of celestial systems.And so the idea that at the very beginning of computation, there is this fundamental link between computation and cosmology, and how it is that intelligence locates and orients itself in relation to its planetary condition, we take as a kind of foundational inspiration for not only what computation is, but indeed what it's for.

A bit then about the program itself, it is, as intimated, a philosophy of technology program, it is also a speculative design program, but I think increasingly, it really might be thought of as more of a speculative engineering program.

The philosophy that we try to develop within the academic discourse of philosophy of technology is one that tries to engage and develop concepts from a direct relationship with emergent technological systems that in many ways have already outpaced the concepts and languages that we have to make sense of them, let alone how to orient them.

Our team is large and vast and wonderful. Some people are here today, and so please say hello and thank you to them, and we'll all be very happy to continue to engage with you. Thanks also as well to our friends at the Berggruen Institute, many of whom are also here today as well.

The real structure of the program however is the network of affiliate and studio researchers that we have collaborated with very closely over the years. The year 2025, as you can see here, is open, I'll talk a little bit about that later on.

Very quickly about the design work that we do: this kind of cinematic vernacular is very important to the way in which we develop the work, not only how to communicate it, but also how we investigate ideas in both an analytical and aesthetic structure.

Planetary computation is really the core idea of the program and in this means a few things. An understanding of computation at planetary scale that global infrastructures are becoming increasingly not only computational but cognitive in their capacities. We investigate this core idea through the lens of synthetic intelligence or AI, simulations, hemispherical stacks (which refers to the geopolitics of computation) and the theme of today's event, planetary sapience, which in some respects is the most philosophical of our initiatives.

The term planetary sapience was originally an essay in Noema, also published by Berggruen Institute a couple years ago, which you can read.

I'll introduce the idea. I apologize, as a writer, I think through words, and so I prepared a short little text of introduction, so if you'll indulge me, I'll present that to you in a moment.

The real idea is how do we locate the artificialization of intelligence in the long-term evolutionary arc of the emergence of intelligence itself as a complex planetary phenomenon. One way to think about this is that we, the fire apes, have in a very unlikely but precocious way managed to figure out how to fold little bits of metal and wire and run electricity through it, such that the rocks are capable of feats of cognition previously only primates had. This is part of the question that we are interested in. The dynamics of a kind of thinking about the evolution of technology and the evolution of biology and the evolution of intelligence as interrelated, co-mingling, nonlinear scaffolding dynamics is one of the key frameworks that we are working with.This is a topic I went through in some detail in the lecture.

Some of the issues around understanding of computation as the fundamental dynamic of how it is that we are artificializing not only intelligence but also life, also sensory capacities, and all the things that make life are not only in the process of being recomposed through the process of artificialization but the computation itself is now the fundamental technology of this. Which puts its status not only as an instrumental technology but indeed as what we call an existential technology.

Now the question which will be underlined perhaps in the background of a lot of the discussions today is in lieu of the various interlocking crises—climatic, planetary and otherwise—in which we our moment is situated, in what way is complex intelligence, especially through the dynamics of its artificialization, adaptive and to what ways it may in fact be ultimately self extinguishing. The real question as we say is not necessarily is it or isn't it adaptive but how might it be made adaptive. What constitutes the framework and preconditions for a viable planetarity and how may complex evolution continue?

The event here is also an opportunity for us to announce a collaboration with MIT Press. Thanks to Amy Brand and Nick Lindsay and Noah Springer who are here with us today, there will be an Antikythera book series with MIT Press.

The first book in this series is called What Is Intelligence? by Blaise Agüera y Arcas who you'll meet a little bit later today. It will be published in 2025. We have a preview of that wonderful little book called modestly entitled What Is Life? We have a truly remarkable James Goggin, the designer of the book, who is with us here today.

We also are developing a digital journal which all of the participants of our two panels today are contributing to in various ways, those of you who were here on Wednesday, saw all about that. These are the authors for the first issue of the journal, many of whom are here today. That first issue will be out in May. The preview, however, of the journal and some of the examples of how these articles and projects will be presented is already live at journal.antikythera.com.

The journal articles were not only written by some of our key collaborators, they are themselves collaborations between these extraordinary thinkers and some of the most interesting digital designers of our time. Each is designed and composed as a bespoke and hopefully definitive example of the thinking that has gone into them.

Our authors include people both living and non-living. Turing and Vernadsky obviously, as well as the really wonderful digital designers that we are continuing to work with, some of whom are here today, and so we're very glad to be able to work with them. Again, journal.antikythera.org is where you can see the preview of the whole initiative and ultimately where the project will be living.

Last point of introduction to the program before I turn to the planetary sapience itself is that Antikythera runs studios every year. One of the core aspects and structure of our program is the design studios that we run every year. The next studio will be held here at MIT in 2025 over the early summer and we look forward to the opportunity to collaborate with some of you all.

All right, so again, these are some of the relevant links for you to consider as you learn more about the program and hopefully find some ways to engage.

With that, let me take a couple more minutes to just set the agenda for today and the topic of planetary sapience before I introduce our esteemed panelists and we get underway.

The question of planetary sapience is really comes down to posing the question, what is and what may be and what must be the relationship between the planetary and intelligence itself? And where does planetary computation fit into this?

The questions are equally philosophical and technological at the same time. The relationship between the two is one of, among other things, disclosure and revealing.

Over millions of years, intelligence has emerged from a planetary condition, which wasn't until quite recently disclosed to intelligence through forms of technological perception more opaque than it has been.

The relationship is also one of composition. For the present and for the future, how can complex intelligence, both evolved and artificialized, conceive a more viable, long-term coupling between the biosphere and the technosphere? So I'd like to then get right to it and begin our conversation with the panelists.

Before doing so, to get a bit more granular with the agenda, one of the things that you'll see in the course of the whole conversation around the Antikythera program is that it's quite interdisciplinary. It is a synthetic initiative, and the disciplinary backgrounds of all of our participants attest to this, as do some of the ways in which we're framing the question of planetary sapience, one that is based not entirely and not only on a kind of anthropomorphic vision of Earth, constituted by some single noösphere, but rather in ways in which modes of intelligence are identified in multiple scales and in multiple types, some ancient and some very new.

These include mapping the extension and externalization of sensory perception, redefining computer science as an epistemological discipline, not only one of algorithmic operations, but indeed of computational planetary systems, comparing stochastic predictive processing in both neural networks and artificial intelligence and identify their correspondences, embracing the time of the planetary past and future of the foundation for a less anthropomorphic view of history, modeling life, both by the transduction of energy and the transmission of information, exploring substrate dependence and interdependence of general intelligence in all its forms, embracing, as you'll see in the first panel, of astronautics and space exploration as a philosophical pursuit, one that defines the limits of humanity's tethering to Earth and how it extends beyond. Exploring how astro-imaging, such as Earth seen from space and distant cosmic events seen by Earth, has contributed to the planetary as model orientation. Theorizing simulations as epistemological technologies that allow for prediction, speculation, and synthetic phenomenology, measuring evolutionary time in the complexity of material objects that surround us and constitute us. Finally, re-composing definitions of life, intelligence, and technology in light of what is revealed by the increasing artificialization and recombination of each.

These modes of intelligence together lead us to construct a technological philosophy that might, hopefully, synthesize into a path leading towards that viable planetarity, a capacity for complex intelligence to cohere and compose its own artificial future.

With that, let me introduce our panelists, to whom we are very grateful for joining us today and participating in the conversation. Then each of them will do a very short presentation of the work and thinking that they've been doing in relation to the Antikythera program and we will really begin the open conversation which we will be able to listen to.

First, Dava Newman, our host here of MIT Media Lab, Space Science. Dava Newman is the Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics at MIT and Harvard MIT Health Sciences and Technology Faculty Member. She also served as NASA Deputy Administrator from 2015 to 2017. Her research in multidisciplinary aerospace, biomedical engineering, investigates human performance across the spectrum of gravity including spacesuits, life support and astronaut performance. Newman is the author of Interactive Aerospace Engineering and Design.

To her left is Peter Galison of the Harvard Black Hole Initiative and Professor of Physics and History of Science there. The central component of Peter's work involves the exploration of 20th century microphysics, atomic nuclear particle physics. He examines physics as a closely interconnected set of scientific subcultures, experimenters, instrument makers and theorists. His many books include How Experiments End, Image and Logic, A Material Culture of Microphysics, Einstein's Clock and Poincaré's Maps, a personal favorite of mine, and Objectivity with Lorraine Daston. His latest feature film is Black Holes: The Edge of All We Know.

To his left is my friend Nicholas de Monchaux, who is Professor and Head of Architecture here at MIT. Until 2020, Nicholas was the Professor of Architecture, Urban Design and Craigslist Distinguished Chair in New Media Berkeley, where he also served as Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media. De Monchaux is the author of Space Suit: Fashioning Apollo from MIT Press, an Architectural and Urban History of the Apollo Space Suit.

To his left is Xin Liu. Xin is Artist-in-Residence at the SETI Institute, an advisor for LACMA's Art and Tech Lab, a researcher at Antikythera, the founding arts curator in the Space Exploration Initiative here at MIT Media Lab, and a visiting fellow at Cornell Tech. She creates experiences, experiments, and experiments that take measurements of our personal, social, and technological spaces in a post-metaphysical world, between gravity and homeland, sorrow and the composition of tears, gene sequencing, and astrology. Recent institutional solo exhibitions include Seedlings and Offsprings from Pioneer Works, At the End of Everything, at Artpace in 2024, she participated in Rhizome's flagship program, 7x7, and joined the Chao Center for Asian Studies at Rice University. She was the first Artist-in-Residence at the Houston Asian American Archive.

And then last is Katherine Hayles. Katherine Hayles is a literary critic, most notable for her contribution to the fields of literature and science, electronic literature, and American literature. She's a distinguished research professor at UCLA, and the James Duke professor emerita from Duke University. Her many books in print include Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Non-Conscious, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis, and a book of deep influence on our program, How We Became Posthuman.

So with that, it's my pleasure to welcome you here and to the conversation, this is it. I'd like to keep this rather open, I'll begin with a few questions around this, and then by all means, please just jump in. Before we do, I want to give each of you the opportunity to tell us a little bit about what you're doing. So please, Dava.

Dava Newman

Thank you very much.

Welcome to the Media Lab. I'm the director of the Media Lab, and we're just thrilled to have you all join us and for the whole week, as Benjamin says. Amazing. Thank you for your great lecture.

In all of exploration, there's three fundamental questions. Are we alone? Are there other habitable planets? And is there life elsewhere? The evidence is mounting. In the 10 seconds, you're seeing this beautiful Hubble image. 3,000 new stars were formed. We pointed Hubble at a very dark space in the sky. It's cosmic fireworks, you know, a celestial birthplace of potential life and of all of these planets. Again, in all the explorations that we do, we're looking for life elsewhere. We will become interplanetary, and that tells us a lot about life here. Definitely planetary and interplanetary quest. What I'm showing here from Hubble, an optical telescope. That's been amazing, working for three decades.

And now we're flying our James Webb Space Telescope. It's amazing. It's in the infrared. And the same pillars of creation that you see here. Look at what we can unveil. We're looking in and seeing what was previously invisible. Now it's visible to us, so in these pillars of creation. Plus, engineering-wise in technology, it's 18 articulating mirrors covered with beryllium. It's awesome. It's just amazing. It is the world's greatest telescope.

It's not just finding science and revealing science. It's having us ask new fundamental questions that we hadn't even previously thought of, new questions for exploration that we hadn't previously thought of.

Okay, a little bit closer to home here. Since I'm very fascinated with the search for life and the search for life and planetary systems, we have ocean worlds, ocean world missions.

Now, spaceship Earth, right in the middle. This is to scale, so I like this chart.

My favorite planet, I should mention. But look at the little Enceladus. I know it doesn't look like much, but it's awesome. It's spewing out hydrocarbons out of its south pole.

And then there's Europa. We just launched a mission, the Europa Clipper, to Europa, a moon of Jupiter. Those are heat maps, because these are icy worlds. They have a lot of ice, but they're water worlds. A search for life, a simple search for life, a carbon-based life, we say follow the water.

All of these wonderful moons right here in our solar system are great places to look for life.

Zooming in a little bit more, Mars. Mars is one of my specialties. It's been a life goal to get humans to Mars. Why? To discover life, probably past life. Mars and Earth are sister planets, 4.5 billion years old each, and then something went wrong with Mars 3.5 billion years ago. It lost its dynamo, his electromagnetism. But we've been searching and exploring Mars for 50 years, but not with humans yet. That first human mission will probably surpass five decades of exploration.

MOXIE is the MIT experiment on the right that you see. We made oxygen on the surface of another planet. So Institute researchers made oxygen for the first time ever on another planetary body. We took the carbon dioxide atmosphere, we split out those carbon atoms, and we recombined the element to oxygen, to get oxygen. Now, you might think is to keep yourself alive, that's secondary. First is to provide fuel, because when we send our humans to Mars, it's round trip, and we'd like to make sure that your fuel depots are there on Mars to get you home.

I think if the audio files are working, just thought a little treat for you, again, real quickly here would be to hear some sounds from Mars.

Always bring cameras, we have 32 cameras on the Perseverance rover, and always bring a microphone to give people the experience. So let's see. Use a lot of augmented reality, virtual reality to do our daily science telecons, because of course we're not on Mars, but we think we're on Mars as scientists. We beam our avatars up, and we decide what science we can do today.

So here's the rover. That's a laser tapping. It's always windy on Mars. Listen how basic it sounds

Okay, now here's an audio file from Earth, and then I filtered it to Mars, so you can see this difference living in this carbon dioxide atmosphere.

Here's the same sound file on Mars so you can experience, that's what it'll sound like it's very different when we get there and we explore and we become interplanetary as a species.

So now what's happening? Right here at the Media Lab and throughout MIT, we're going back to the moon.

It's been five decades. We're going on commercial missions now, rovers and landers to get the scientific data, to prepare for the future human missions that are coming up in just the next few years. Developing the tools, the lunar simulations. Here's a quick video of our simulation of the lunar South Pole. We're going to Shackleton Crater, so we'll go to the South Pole of the moon, that's where the ice is. You want ice, you know, H2O—water, water—ice.

This is our current mission. We're hoping for end of January launch. Pretty exciting, just in a few months. Maybe the end of January we'll launch. This rover will go to the moon and then our experiments that come out of the rover are a camera, color and stereo depth camera on this little rover, as well as what we call a little “astro ant,” a little ant that rolls on top of the big rover to take thermal imaging and things like that. Please join us. We'd love everyone to join us in our lunar mission control coming up in early 2025.

Just to wrap up shortly here, I do specialize in keeping people alive and healthy on other bodies. Well, this is Apollo. I call this my “Lunar Bloopers,”

We sent one scientist to the moon, that’s “Jack” Schmitt, and boy did we make his job hard. How's he supposed to do science if he's in this? It's an engineering feat. The world's wonderful spacecraft and we shrink it around people. Our designs of how to do that differently are to have a very form-fitting suit. Not a big gas-pressurized 160 kilogram suit—big heavy bulky—is what we've done for 50 years. Here, again, at the Media Lab and across campus, we're really working and collaborating: engineers, artists, architects, designers, to say: “How can we actually use very advanced technology?” This is a 3D seam knitted, of that current prototype that we came up with, and it has sensing, it's very much a tight form-fitting to pressurize someone, keep you alive, but to enable your exploration, to enable how you can perform on Mars or the moon.

I wanna end my brief comments on what's all this for? What's all this space exploration for? I think it's very pertinent to the talk that we're having today.

It's for the planet.

All of our learnings, I think, we need to reflect back on Earth to have this overview effect of Earth and what do you care about it? Well, we care a lot about spaceship Earth, all of our systems, all of our living systems. I call them the vital signs of Earth, all of our Earth satellites looking down on Earth to serve up the vital signs of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gases, the methane. What do you care about flooding or fire, or natural disasters? So we put people, it's kind of a design tool for us, in these immersive environments where you can see holistically the world, you can curate it yourself to these dashboards, and then on this digital table, you'll pop up your city because what you care about is where you live and where your family lives and where your loved one lives. Giving people these types of design tools for this type of experience.

I want to keep it there and very, very glad to join the conversation. Thank you.

Peter Galison

I work with colleagues, a large worldwide collaboration, on black holes where we're not likely to find habitable environments. But it is planetary, our study. To be able to take an image of something in space, you want a big aperture, the big telescope, and to see our nearest and dearest black holes—one at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, Sagittarius A*, and one in the massive galaxy, in the Virgo, M87, a Messier 87*—you need to be able to have a huge telescope because in terms of angular spread in the sky, it's like an atom held at arm's length from our face. To get the aperture size we need, you need to cover the Earth with telescopes.

The Event Horizon Telescope is a collaboration with more than 200 people in dozens of countries around the world, set up or used the already existing radio telescopes in many different places, eight telescopes or arrays of telescopes on six sites. The fundamental unit of this kind of work is the baseline between telescopes. So right from the beginning, at a technical, rigorous, and inevitable level, is connections. No one country, no one telescope, no one observatory can function alone. It's meaningless unless it's connected to others.

So what you're seeing in the left panel of the leftmost slide are the baselines as they come into view of the black hole of M87. It's these combinations, these baselines and these triangles that are formed by them that allow you to get to cover, to create the virtual telescope to fill it out. That's what you're seeing in the middle panel of the left slide. As these different baselines come into view, you begin to see dots. And then as the Earth rotates, you begin to see them rotate and fill this out.

You're using not only the planet in its extent, in its size, but also in its rotation. It is an Earth instrument, not the Earth as object of inquiry, not mapping where continents are, it's not mapping cosmic rays or magnetic fields or methane. It's using the Earth as part of the instrument itself to make heavenly observations.

In the right panel on the left-hand slide, what you see is as the virtual telescope is filled up in the middle panel, you begin to see this image form, the one that is well known. We first saw it about a year before this, but it was a year of struggling mightily to make sure that it was not an artifact. The last thing in the universe we wanted was to show a picture and then have to retract it as an artifact. So, in April of 2019, that image was released and several billion people saw it in the first 48 hours.

The middle panel illustrates something else, which is that back in November of 2019, Albert Einstein's theory was first checked—in a way that gave him world historical fame—by Arthur Eddington, who saw that the starlight was bent as it went around the Earth on its way to us. But when around a black hole near the horizon, you could actually not only bend light, you could send it into orbit. So what you're seeing in the middle slide here is light in the first sense, just bent more than Einstein saw in 1919. But you can have more than that. You can have light that comes in and actually goes into orbit around the black hole.

And so immediately after seeing the image on the left, the right hand panel of the left hand slide, we began to say: “Could we go deeper into that hot plasma, that hot billion degree gas that orbits around the black hole near the horizon and see this thin ring of orbiting light?”

That orbiting light tells you everything about the black hole. It's right near the horizon. Light in general relativity tracks out the straight lines, the geometry of space time. What you're seeing is that as you begin to make an image of this, it is actually a trace of the dynamics of space time itself.

This is a picture of the photon ring as it's envisaged in simulation in the middle slide against the background of direct light that's just bent somewhat by the black hole. You're seeing the geometry of space time near an edge of the universe, which the horizon is. In a strict mathematical physical sense, the horizon is an edge of the universe. Anything that crosses over it has left us.

On the right hand slide, then, you see something else, which is what it would look like if we could make a movie, which is one of the things we'd like to do, by expanding the event horizon telescope to not only have more telescopes on Earth, but to go into space to extend the virtual telescope, not to Earth size, but to five times Earth size in the, and to be able to look inside that big, more blurry hot gas.

And if you could, if you could see that, a movie would tell you immediately that you were looking at the photon ring, this thin ring of orbiting light, because it's fixed in space. It bears the imprint of the black hole, but it's not swirling gas. It doesn't have the dynamics of the things you would expect as hot gas orbited around the black hole.

Seeing something static on that ring that you see there that's not changing is the photon ring. You couldn't mistake it, then, for a tendril of orbiting gas.

That's the ambition. We have a mission, quite a number of us now around the world are working on a space mission, which we hope will fly in about seven years, as a proposed NASA mission, to be able to see the photon ring. It's called the Black Hole Explorer. That's using an Earth size and then a more-than-Earth-size telescope to see this.

And if I could now go into philosophy for a moment, the photon ring captures light from everywhere in the universe in a way that's not practical, but philosophically true. Each orbit of this infinite series of rings that are around the black hole captures all the light that's arrived there from anywhere. It represents, if you were to imagine, with the eyes of the cosmic links, that you could peer into these rings sequentially. You'd see a movie of the history of the whole visible universe.

And so in a sense, the black hole is watching us as we watch it.

Thank you.

Nicholas de Monchaux

These are very tough acts to follow.

I am going to thank the patience of Antikythera in a couple of ways. First of all, I'm going to speak and use this opportunity to think through an essay that is overdue for the first issue of the Antikythera Journal. I do so with humility, especially among such distinguished historians. I am part of a different long tradition, which is the architect as historical thinker and the designer as historical thinker.

I work on designing structures, experiences, environments here on Earth. It was even a co-instructor of the space studio. There was and is an amazing collaboration with the Media Lab and AeroAstro here at MIT, whose artifacts you see in the lobby of the Media Lab right now.

But the essay, which I'm gonna attempt to briefly describe to you, is an attempt in this tradition to think through a kind of prehistory of a sort of global network of digital artifacts, one of whose most important tasks, as Paul Edwards has written about, is in fact to simulate the Earth it encompasses and help us understand the situation of the climate crisis and all that surrounds it.

In a way, instead of tracing buildings, my own trajectory in this essay is to trace the historical and sometimes even literal mechanical connections between a set of objects that allow us to predate this global artifact of simulation back to the point when it could be identified in a series of objects, of interconnected historical and physical objects. And of course, it's just one trajectory through that history and many others are possible.

Mine starts, as many stories do, here at MIT. And it's in the steps of our colleague David Mindell, who's shown that the story of cybernetics is not really the story of a book that then had a lot of influence—although it is that—it's actually the prehistory of a milieu of physical artifacts that created the environment or created the need for such a theory.

In this case, in a very literal way, Warren Weaver, who first supervised the interconnection between artillery and radar that inspired cybernetics, had concluded that project successfully. It was off shooting down rockets above London by the time he even had his first conversation with Norbert Wiener, who for propaganda reasons needed to be utilized in the Second World War and they gave him something to do and it turned into an unexpected and very influential bestseller.

It's also a story that I think interestingly, particularly for me, encompasses a kind of two different kinds of, or three different kinds of history. The history of objects that simulate, the history of urban simulation, of thinking about the city as an object complex enough that we may want to know it in ways before we see it or create it, and as the title of the essay also says, it uniquely encompasses the space between worlds. Not just the real and the virtual, but the space between worlds that Milton was the first to coin as encompassing the heavens as well.

In the trajectory of the essay, we have first the self-synchronizing motors of the radar and artillery directors that have inspired both Wiener and the kind of this milieu.

We have the development at MIT of novel theories of urban perception by Georgi Kepas and not coincidentally, the recently decommissioned army officer Kevin Lynch, including speculation about novel graphic techniques to map images or create images of the city that would record new kinds of technological movement through it.

The use of the literally the very same motors that connected the radar unit and M9 artillery director by a young technician Douglas Trumbull to create graphic animations using surplus radar supplies in LA in the 1950s and the eventual use of this expertise to create the slow and steady movement, the only movement that was actually possible technically of the spaceships of 2001 connected to, of course, the history of airplane trainers and ultimately modern real-time computing out of them. The need is also documented by David Mindell to create effective simulations for Apollo astronauts who could not otherwise be trained the land on the moon before they got there.

The adaptation in turn by the largest television network in the world at the time—CBS—of those simulation mechanisms to make up for the very inadequate visuals that NASA was at the time offering, it's learned to do better since then. The inspiration of those simulations by CBS on a producer of the CBS lunar broadcast, Peter Hyams, to produce a screenplay about a faked Mars landing, that was only green lit after Watergate, but which would lead in part to the fact that about 6% of Americans today believe the lunar landing was faked.

The collapse of aerospace funding after Apollo and under the burden of the Vietnam War leading to a very temporary but significant investment of aerospace dollars in that other momentary national priority of the problem of the city, the connection between that increase in funding to the use of the lunar landing simulator in the University of California to study modernist proposals for downtown LA and then on the Berkeley campus, the use of the study by Kevin Lynch's protege and co-author on the sequel to The Image of the City—The View From the Road—on automotive perception in the landscape of Marin that is actually depicted in the slide in front of you.

This involved hiring Douglas Trumbull's protege, John Dykstra, who had been the effects director on Trumbull's directorial debut of Silent Running, which you haven't necessarily heard of because it was a commercial failure, but it was a technical success and contained new innovations in camera control, which in turn led to John Dykstra using a machine descended from an aircraft simulator, a digital mini computer developed here at MIT to create a highly novel process for graphically simulating this landscape of Marin County, which then in turn led to the hiring of Dykstra by George Lucas in 1974 as the only effects specialist who could reproduce an eight minute reel of the same World War II dogfights, that inspired the artillery director to begin with, which he wanted to use as the narrative core of a film then called Adventures of the Star Killer, which we now know as Star Wars, which in turn was connected to the early success of Industrial Light and Magic founded by Dykstra to produce these effects and its ultimate split in 2006 into two firms, one based on the innovations in model-built animations and computer camera controls that could trick the eye, in fact, into creating vast illusory amounts of detail, and another firm devoted to the then new technology of in fact rendering vast amounts of detail in digital virtual environments.

The former company was bankrupt by 2011 and the latter techniques of course now are increasingly indistinguishable from a singular narrative and this rather like the global environment of simulation which Edwards and others have recounted.

Where does this leave us? It is a question under consideration by me, but amongst other things it leaves us in Boston, whose dendritic structures had a unique influence of its own on theories of urban perception. Lynch spent eight years studying Boston for The Image of the City and 2-3 months each on the two other cities that are in the book, it is a kind of illusory symmetry between the three. Boston is of course very unique in its structure.

It leaves us also at a moment when simulations of ourselves as Benjamin spoke about on Wednesday night, occupy a kind of shadow city whose effects on the urban landscape and ecology we're only beginning to understand.

It leaves us finally with one of the truisms of both factual space exploration and its science fiction siblings, which is that we go into the space between worlds not just to find what is there but more than often to find ourselves as well.

Thank you.

Benjamin Bratton

It sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it’s not.

Xin Liu

Thank you for the time-warping journey.

I'm Xin Liu, it's really exciting and intimidating to be here because I'm an alumni of the Media Lab so right now I'm sitting among all my professors. I want to share a bit about my practice as an artist and engineer.

In June 1965, NASA astronaut Ed White stepped out of his space shuttle and walked in space for the first time. Out in the vastness, he was tethered to the space station as if a child attached to the mother through the umbilical cord, a new beginning for humankind. When I first had that experience with my own body inside the parabolic flight thanks to the Space Exploration Initiative at the MIT Media Lab, I did not fly. What happened was that the ground beneath me fell.

The truth is, gravity never disappears. It is just everything falling together and the habit will live in reference to each other. So what if progress isn't upwards but back down? If the organic body we carry isn't meant for the space beyond, what shall we become?

Carried by this crystal robotic sculpture, the wisdom tooth departs. The wisdom tooth passage into space is a newborn entering another world, its body enclosed in a hand-sculpted glass skin and its life supported by the electromagnetic system. I'll say it's the skin, the blood, the bone and the spirit.

Here's a moment of it floating in zero gravity a hundred kilometers above the Earth.

As I birthed this creature in this new world, I was left behind. But perhaps every time when we leave home, part of us has to shed. Anyone who has ever immigrated into another country probably know what I'm saying here. Now I want to know what is left behind.

Back in 2018, I encountered this news article reporting local farmers in dire economic situations often use secondhand rocket metal to make farming tools. The image you see here, the middle one and the left, the little white dots are actually thousands of butterflies flying in a valley. I thought it was a science fiction movie shot but it was actually a news article. I want to see the moment of the terrestrial death of an extraterrestrial object. And that started my journey as a rocket hunter.

Since the 1960s, hundreds of pieces of satellites, modules of space station, cargo spacecraft and transfer vehicles of various shapes and forms and from most Western countries have regularly followed into the Southern Pacific Ocean. Point Nemo, it is the farthest geo-point from any land mass. It is a bit challenging for me to get here.

However, in China, due to historical reasons, its original rocket launch facility was built very much inland, it's called Jiuquan. That is so inland that the first and second stages of the rocket simply cannot reach the ocean before they fell back on the ground.

So I spent two years kind of grappling local newspapers reading archive documents from the libraries, trying to know whether I can find or match everything with public launch information to like a falling incident that I identify as a subsequent event. And only in 2021, I got a filming grant which convinced someone to allow me to take a team and set foot in the South and Northwest of China to hunt for rockets. And it was three months of filming and hunting until in the last two weeks we were able to find two rockets: one in the desert of Gansu, Dunhuang and one inside a valley in Guizhou.

I believe in sharing secrets. So while the hunt for debris goes on, I was in touch with a private space company in China throughout the three years and finally convinced them or like annoyed them enough that they decided to donate one of their debris to my exhibition. It still surprises me that how this like half inch thick metal became so soft and mannable like fabric, as you see right here, after it heats up during the reentry and hit the ground at the moment.

Although this debris has been stripped of any technological components and it's just raw materials as you see here, it was still classified as supplies to weapons and couldn’t be exported out. However, as it washed this metal through the official documents of donation and creating artworks out of the waste metal, these artifacts have now been able to be called art and are actually outside China right now in Los Angeles, part of it, at the Ban Tung Museum of Art for exhibition.

And lastly, I wanna share a project that's very close to my heart because entering my 30s I've been battling with the thought that my body inhabits humanity's desire to sustain and perpetuate its species. This series begin with my fascination with cryogenics as a sci-fi narrative device that often allows protagonists, if I say like a dude lives through eons, yet only upon reaching my own reproductive age did I have the epiphany that the manipulation of time is very much the same technology between cryogenics and egg freezing.

There are solutions of time, or at least for time that is not worth spending until it's valuable and productive. The tyranny of the future is taking over the now. So as I was creating those works, I wanted it to be actually frozen. Maybe go to the slides before that you can see the mouth that is actually cast of my own mouth as a bronze and embedded a cooling system right behind it that causes a single layer of frost to appear on its surface right on the side.

Once a friend of mine, also an alumni from MediaLab, who was pregnant at the time, told me that her ribcage was opening because the hormones cause women's muscles and bones to become softer and more stretchy during pregnancy in order to make space for the child. So maybe as the last sentence I would like to say that I really feel sometimes our body opened, stretched and became the void itself.

Thank you.

N. Katherine Hayles

Well, I'm delighted to be here on the panel and hear so many exciting things about outer space. I'm a sort of transition person who is moving from outer space into inner space and in that sense, perhaps preparing for the next panel to come.

The kind of inner space that I'm particularly interested in thinking about is the space of cognition on the planet Earth. Why am I interested in cognition specifically? Because I think that anthropocentrism is one of the forces driving this planet into unprecedented crises. Anthropomorphism, that is thinking with human brains and seeing with human eyes is inevitable, but anthropocentrism—placing the human at the center of our thoughts and our ideas—is by no means inevitable and should be contested. If you're interested in contesting anthropocentrism, cognition becomes central.

Humans aren't the fastest creatures on the Earth, we're not the strongest, we're not the biggest, but we congratulate ourselves that our cognition is so superior that we can build machines that will outpace every other species on the Earth. So to begin then thinking about cognition in these terms is to envision it not as a human capacity, but as a biological capacity. And it's my assertion that every species on this planet has some cognitive capabilities.

To make that argument, of course, I had to come up with a definition of cognition and I was looking for something that had a low threshold to count as cognitive but could scale up to something as complex as human sensibility. So the definition I came up with was this: a process of interpreting information in context that is connected with meaning. There are a lot of loaded words in that sentence, meaning, context, interpretation, but in the way that I parse those loaded words, every species creates meaning for itself through its interpretation of environmental information.

What does meaning mean in that context? Basically, it means the ability to continue its existence. Every organism on Earth, every living organism will strive to continue its existence. And in that sense, it has cognitive capabilities that can interpret information from the environment in terms that are meaningful to it. In this sense, meaning becomes a means and becomes a species-specific attribute. That's one way to break that sense that only humans can create meaning.

In this view, every organism creates meaning for itself and it does so through the capacities that create a world for it, or in Jakob von Uexkull's terminology and umwelt, the worlds around our world horizon. These are some of the ideas that I worked out in my forthcoming book called Bacteria to AI.

I was also interested in extending the notion of cognition to synthetic systems as well, specifically computational media and AI. In the article that I'll be contributing to Antikythera, I go on to expand five criteria for something to count as a cognitive system. It's specified by the acronym SIRAL, S-I-R-A-L: sensing, interpreting, responding, anticipating, and learning. I test that criteria against minimally cognitive systems such as plants and bacteria, where I am able to show that it does distinguish between cognition and something like automatic adaptation or homeostatic systems.

And then I use it to discuss cognition in terms of large language models. The main difference that appears in that analysis is that large language models don't have ability to sense their physical environments, rather they sense what one might call their conceptual environments: the constructions and representations that they make from human-authored texts.

And then finally, I have fun comparing what an LLM makes of a human-authored text, Henry James' novella Figure in the Carpet compared to what I as a human critic make of that same thing.

Thank you.

Benjamin Bratton

Thank you all. I think you begin to get a little bit of sense of the intricate carpet of the discourse we've revealed here. I have several thoughts, more than we can possibly get through over the course of this, but we're gonna try to set this up.

Instead of going one by one, I'm gonna just throw out three prompts, because what I'm interested in is the interrelations between them, and then I'm just gonna throw it open to all of you, and just speak whenever you like, it’s just conversation.

So one, at the beginning, it was a question of making meaning, and the capacity of making meaning in relationship with it.

I think it's clear from discussion that thinking through the planetary, and thinking of ourselves in relation to the planetary, is increasingly the most important way in which we try to establish not only a scientific predicament, but to make meaning of what we're doing, which obviously has significance.

Nicholas, you also didn't talk about the book you wrote on Spacesuits. I was taken by this phrase that you used, when we're making we shrink the world around the person, that's the line. Shrinking the world around the person.

There's ways in which we may have thought of the figure of the astronaut during the Apollo era as a kind of exceptional figure. But it seems like one of the differences between that era and this era, is that in many ways that figure of the astronaut, of a kind of fragile fetus-like body, tethered to a technical environment, isn't something different.

That's us. As the saying goes, ladies and gentlemen, we are in space right now. The astronaut has a kind of generic figure, a kind of a Vitruvian figure, it's a word, but precisely because it's not, is so dependent on these other kinds of dynamics. This may be perhaps one of the ways in which we are finding meaning.

Another one had to do with the question of life and finding life. A couple weeks ago, I had the pleasure of visiting Stewart Brand, who was telling me about when he was at JPL, when the Viking mission landed on Mars, he was standing next to Carl Sagan, and he asked Sagan, "Do you think there's life on Mars?" And he turned, "Well, there is now."

I think we're already an interplanetary species in this way, if you count the technosphere as part of the Earthlings around as well.

But the question may be around the meaning and the philosophical and existential meaning of astrobiology and finding existential life, and in need of understanding us as astrobiology, we are astrobiology right here, has to do with this question of aloneness, and to the extent to what Sagan thought the solar system is teeming with life, and all we need to do is pick up the phone.

The Rare Earth hypothesis seems to be becoming more central, and it's the aloneness that may be really what we are facing, which may have equally profound implications for how we think through this.

So lastly, and then I throw it open, what's also striking to me is the importance of the extraplanetary in defining and conceiving of the planetary itself, whether that's the Frank White and the overview effect, literally the discovery of Earth through movement into space, it was Earth with the planet who has been discovered, the dependency of climate science, it's time for climate science in space science, one way or another, but that boundary between the planetary and the extraplanetary now feels less strict, like it's less of an inside-outside and more of a kind of gradient dynamic. The Earth as an open system that is defined not only as a kind of encapsulated Blue Marble, but as part of a larger astronomical economy and dynamic.

These are some of the themes as we're defined by this, and I can just invite any thoughts or responses to this, or anything else you'd like to.

Nicholas de Monchaux

I mean, I can, in some ways. I think Dava should also answer the question about the astronaut. I think it is the spacewalking astronaut or cosmonaut, who was the first, Alexei Leonov was of course the first person to float above the Earth in a way that was mediated only by something that we could call clothing, even if in a very special kind. And that relates to a really interesting point that one can make, and actually Paul Edwards refers to it, and Dennis Kolkov as well, is that the Earthrise photograph, the first color one, and then of course the whole Earth photograph, which was a kind of politically mediated reality that was created at the end of the Apollo era, because you had to apply a special trajectory to get an unshadowed Earth in the frame.

These were very unique moments in the history of Earth's awareness of itself, not just because we could see the whole Earth for the first time in a way that we're now weirdly used to, but because, as Edwards points out, it was a moment of historical singularity in its own way, because it was like the last time we transported a single technological artifact, like the Hasselblad camera that was used by the astronaut to such a position that that single lens, frame and exposure plate could capture the whole planet on it, and that was a very, very special moment.

And then increasingly as our technological systems became more interconnected, as is the underlying dependencies of the work that Peter showed as well, we can see more and more and more of the Earth, but it's less and less possible to identify a single mechanism that allows us to do so, or a single artifact, or a single kind of shutter or frame, and so that's a kind of an inflection point in which that single image is a kind of really interesting pivot, and imagining a whole planet has a very interesting history in special effects terms as well, because it was Douglas Trumbull's attempts in a film that Graphic Arts made for the World's Fair in 1964 that first brought into Kubrick's attention. It's a very difficult thing to do, to try and depict the whole planet, so it had a whole system with like oil and et cetera, and then the Trumbull built three mechanisms for, and I have to also credit my colleague, Caroline Jones, who worked with me to bring Douglas Trumbull to MIT, shortly before he passed away, and give us a chance to kind of really unpack this all with him, but there were three mechanisms that he famously built, each of which had in its own way the idea of the depiction of a whole world.

One was the mechanism that allowed the depiction of the Discovery spaceship, which it’s best known for, in which the actual giant model of the spaceship had 60 foot foundations into the bedrock of Slough in East London, and then the camera moved slowly past it to give you the sense of the motion. The second mechanism was famously the slit scan technique, which created psychedelically a transition with worlds, but the much lesser than of these three is something that was called the Jupiter machine, which took a single piece of steel with a white painted edge, and projected a light on it as it slowly orbited, as it slowly turned in circles, which allowed the creation of Jupiter and Europa and the Earth and all the planets that were actually depicted in the film so it was only this play of light on an edge as it was cast around in space that gave like just before we could photograph these things gave a kind of an appropriate sense of a whole world. Seeing the whole world has always been a very important ambition of both technology and placement of human beings in the world. How we do it is a very important thread in the story.

Benjamin Bratton

And cosmology more generally, and the cosmograph of this as well.

I think he threw it to you on the astronaut.

Dava Newman

I'll take the ball, I have a few things to say.

So again, an astronaut suit is an engineering marvel because you shrink all of the life support systems is the point I want to make, because all of your life support systems, as you mentioned, because we are dependent, you need your oxygen to breathe, and your carbon dioxide so we're in this precious, precious planet. Life worked out pretty well for us here, and as we explore and we go beyond, we want to keep living beings alive, so all of those systems that we are dependent on.

I wanted to then flip that to all of Earth's systems, I think Earth, and the different subsystems, is specifically with a big focus on the oceans. You think about living in balance, with our resources and nature, and think about the oceans, because that's, I think, the urgency in terms of climate, planetary survival and life support systems, is all of our exploring, we're just kind of seeing, how could other life exist?

Yes, it's probably teeming with life, but do you know what, Venus? Venus is a runaway greenhouse gas system. It's not like here, planet, the Spaceship Earth, where we know what Venus is like, we know what Mars is like: very, very rocky, kind of very dead, maybe fossilized life.

And then come back to Earth systems, and starting at the oceans, 95% of the Earth's oceans we haven't explored, we haven't monitored and mapped and measured. That's where life, our life, and then on the hand, of course, all of us, and our urban environments, our rovers, and then to the atmospheres, most people think about planetary, atmospheric climate, but I would submit that space, low Earth orbit space, where most of our satellites are, is not so special anymore, it's very accessible, very democratized, we're sending out missions daily. So, getting to the moon and Mars, that's a deep space, that's but just people, thousands of people, it's millions of people living, and we are planetary-wise and species-wise, moving out to low Earth orbit, we can look down on Earth, that's just an extension, I think, of life, from low Earth orbit, looking down. It's just the sphere, we're taking a look at the Earthrise, but now including low Earth orbit, and people living and thriving, doing all this, that's just the horizon that we're on.

Benjamin Bratton

Like I mentioned, this is an interesting thing for a planet to do, to sprout this crust of sensors.

Peter, as you know, I'm deeply fascinated and admiring the Event Horizon project. Which, as you indicated, the way in which it turns the planet into a machine, that the planet constructs itself in such a way that it becomes the sensory and cognitive mechanism. I know that part of, as you mentioned, the anticipation, is to then also not just to make a machine as big as the planet itself, but actually go further, to extend beyond that in one way or another.

Now, you're also a historian of science and technology. Is this a category of one? How would one locate a planet, it is a technology within the history of technology itself? What kind of machine is this?

I also wanted to ask you about Brand, which is another thing, about Stewart Brand and the Blue Marble, but please.

Peter Galison

Well, we've been launching satellites for a long time, and ones that go much further, like the James Webb Telescope, which goes to L2, which is a million miles away, but I think what's distinct here is that these things are only meaningful in their connectivity. It's not just that they send back data, it's that the data itself, even if you had it from the satellite, would be nothing without all the other telescopes. That I think is interesting, and in a way makes this one machine, as opposed to a collection of machines. That seems to me interesting. I think there's gonna be lots of other future ways in which that kind of interferometric connection among devices will be very important.

Another thing that struck me in the talks was the way space technology in particular, has this dual aspect. There's a kind of visionary, bringing the future to us, in a very inspiring way. Dava showed us these images of what has been and what will be our presence on the Moon and on Mars and the fly-bys of the Moons of Jupiter and so on. And there the technology seems so integrated to us, where, I mean, and drawing the spacesuits closer and less awkward.

And at the same time, there's the technology as it falls back down to us or is captured in remnants of Xin Liu's looking for these remnants of spacecraft that have crashed or left over or surplus. And Nicholas has done things with space gloves and when the technology is without us, when it's just broken or leftover or an artifact, when it's a historical technology, it seems so fragile. You know, such a delicate perch, such an artifact of what almost feels like the deep past, even if these suits—they're not from the Stone Age.

But I think that the spacesuit can both look like the future and the past, both look empowering and future-oriented and fragile and cascaded down, seems to me a kind of beautiful juxtaposition that space is both our past and our future. Just hearing these together was very striking to me.

I think the relationship of certain kinds of images which attain a kind of fascination to us, kind of iconic quality, that certainly Earthrise has—over many decades now. And Stewart Brand has of course done much to help us understand what it means to have a grasp of the synoptic view of us and our planet.

And there is something about the black hole. One of the things that's fascinating in that interregnum between us first seeing the image maybe 10 months before it was released and its wide distribution is that even people who had been simulating this for a long time, for years and years, (and the images that came out of these simulations are called general relativistic magneto-hydrodynamic images) were stunned by seeing the real one, the actual image.

You could say, well, is it real? Is it artificial color? It's infrared? It's a shadow? It's a computational image? But so are the images on our cell phones? So I think the one thing that's striking was that at that point people said: “That's the black hole. There is the black hole.” And that kind of ostensive terror of being able to say that, as opposed to “This is what a black hole would look like,” was really striking.

One of my colleagues said she carried around her. It was a big miracle, the biggest miracle of the whole thing was that 200+ physicists kept their mouths shut for ten months. We loved to talk, that's why we went into the field. We wanted to find things and tell people about it, but it didn't leak until April 10th at 9 or 7 a.m. around the world.

That idea that there was something haunting and fragile about the Earthrise and the similar NASA images from the 60s and 70s, and something terrifying about looking at a black hole, that's a black hole bigger than our solar system that is an edge of everything we can know and it's not just that we know from the beautiful LIGO experiments gravity waves that they're black holes, but actually you can see it and there it is. I think that was a different kind of fragility that it pointed to, a repositioning of us in the world, not just as a planet suspended in space, but as extraordinary things in the universe that were vast, tiny on the sky maybe in its image, but huge in extent and surprisingly, objects that are the darkest objects and the brightest objects, the simplest objects, the most complex objects, the biggest objects that are compact and yet unknowable in some way to us. I think that sense of object but not an object, you can fall through the horizon and not know you're falling through, that really is an object of paradox.

Benjamin Bratton

I mean this in a great way. It's also very frightening in this way. I mean, it's an image of the abyss.

There's a link in my mind to Xin Lu's discussion of falling, and space as a kind of falling. This is an inhabitation of a kind of abyss, and a physical corporeal recognition of this abyss is not only the space into which we fall, but the space that makes us.

Xin Liu

Yeah, there is a really beautiful essay by Hito Steyerl about this self-experiment on free fall, and she really talked about how falling is a form of freedom and disruption and deterioration is a way of love and loving inside of that terrifying freedom. I think during and after pandemic, that's very much how I felt in order to re-find a sense of reference and structure in society. And it is just really kind of like a philosophical moment when I first tried the parabolic flight that I realized the only way that I can become this version of superhuman image flying is by falling with the world.

But I really want to tag long Peter's comments on the image because I only have five minutes, so there's a project I couldn't share. I've been very fascinated about debris, as you probably can already tell, and among which the NOAA satellites launched in the 90s for weather monitoring has been one of my favorites. They were decommissioned only two years after they were launched, but they're still functioning at the moment and kind of frequently used by schools as education to help the student understand how satellite transmitting data, et cetera, because they literally scanned through the Earth, taking pictures, and then broadcasting the data back. And you can use a broomstick with two wires and intercept that data in your own apartment, which I did with my partner Gersha, who was sitting here during the pandemic. It was really fascinating because what you're saying about the kind of technologies that are kind of seemingly trapped in time because those satellites, they were launched in the 90s, and then they literally had no one who got up there to upgrade their hardware or firmware, so it was so trapped. Even though the encryption back then was probably the state of art, but fast forward till now, it became something you can just use the Raspberry Pi and easily debug it with something you can buy on Amazon. So it become accessible as a very big infrastructure, like having this little leak because it was trapped in time. And I felt that quite fascinating.

And then through that journey of literally a hacker and amateur activity, I got very interested in orbital photography. And when we talk about Blue Marble, especially the one that would often associate with, not the one that Apollo astronauts took, but the high fidelity version that was released in 2012, it was not the actual picture. It was a composition. It was actually lots of satellites that were taking pictures in low orbit and then later kind of like a collage project created a version of the Earth. And I found that incredibly fascinating because that's kind of the aesthetic choice, but for objective nature to convince the idea that we have an Earth that is looked like that, well, in fact, every single image in that composition is actually taken in different times, so it was like a time lapse of Earth, but then composed altogether to present the world.

Maybe it goes to you because I've been thinking quite a lot about how the moment when we see the Blue Marble image, it kind of marks the beginning of the Anthropocene or the understanding that we are living here. It's almost like you have to leave and look back and realize “oh, I'm this, who I am.” But I've been working on a new project and there's one sentence I've been repeating in my own head is that, "Seeing through the eyes of gods, have we mistaken ourselves for them?" So that's something I've been quite struggling with in my practice in terms of how as a human being crawling on the ground, yet having the visual capacity through all the technology and the infrastructures, I can see like a god, but I'm a person just on the ground. How can we deal with that cognitive and psychological disassociation or shift in our kind of physical, but also technological positions?

Benjamin Bratton

I was gonna ask a similar question. You talk about the scales of biological cognition, but also you've been very careful in the piece to not separate this from the forms of cognition that we identify as technological and to define these together.

I also just wanna say something. We will have time for a bit of Q&A, so think about your questions.

N. Katherine Hayles

If we were to try to write a communal history of anthropocentrism from, say, the Enlightenment to the present, it would, in bird's eye view, look something like this: that in the Enlightenment there's a growing sense of individuality, of the individual person distinct from the community, distinct from the political body. That's sharpened by the rise of capitalism and it’s particularly here in America, it's sharpened with the idea of individuality starting anew, not dependent on the old world for anything and so on and so forth. And that really held sway until, I would say, roughly the last quarter of the 20th century, then—largely because of our growing environmental crises, but also because of the rise of a new kind of biology—the idea of individuality began to give way to interdependencies, and one of the key figures there was Lynn Margulis, the now famous biologist, who argued that symbiosis and symbiogenesis was a primary driver of evolution on planet Earth. She really highlighted the way in which every organism, including human organism, is a multitude of other organisms. No person is really an individual in a biological sense. We have the biota within us, we have all the other ways in which we're interdependent with other organisms' own worth.

Now we're here on the verge of going into space, and a wonderful presentation by Dava about all the challenges that that introduces now. We have a deep embeddedness in Earth ecology. I think on levels that we haven't yet entirely realized is psychological embeddedness, this is very complex physical embeddedness. Dava mentioned, of course, oxygen, but what about the microbial embeddedness of humans in this environment? What happens if we lose or leave behind the environment that co-evolved with us and with which we co-evolved? So yes, we can take our technology into space and survive, but what about all of our interdependencies in other ways?

Looking at that image of the spacesuit that you were showing us where you said the cord coming out is like the umbilical cord, it's tempting to think that the spacesuit is a kind of metaphor, a reintroduction of individuality, radical individuality. Now you have a new skin, now you have a new technological skin that will enable you to leave your planet on which you evolve and go somewhere else, but that umbilical cord reminds us, as Dava pointed out, that in fact there's a whole complex interdependencies that makes that spacesuit work. And if you lose those interdependencies, then you're in a technologically fragile position, as Peter was mentioning.

This idea that now we're reintroducing a notion of individuality I think is deeply flawed, that it has to be seen in correspondence with increasing interdependencies, and even the ability to mount something like a space mission as we're going to do next year, requires all kinds of interdependencies, not only biological but technological as well. So I just wonder what's going to happen with this image of ourselves as, how does Star Trek put it, boldly go where no man has gone before? How will that really work out, along with this increasing need to see the interdependencies here on Earth?

Benjamin Bratton

Yes, to become interplanetary means we need to expand the interdependencies then. Nicholas, yes.

Nicholas de Monchaux

I think there's a very fundamental point, and I really appreciate the point that Katherine's trying to make. I think, so we're up here talking about two things, space and the Earth, and they both have an interesting relationship.

The word space was coined by Milton, and he was influenced by Galileo and the technologies at the time that allowed us to perceive this, and he was trying to literally create the story of God and man. He, for the very first time, with these inventions of the space between worlds, which he was the first to capitalize, he put angels and the devil in the same place. He put them all outside the Earth, and so that was what space was before it was anything else. Then in the 20th century the border between Earth and space was defined by a whole bunch of different scientific disciplines and different altitudes as the line which one needed a certain kind of technology to cross or beyond which a certain kind of technology became necessary, and so lowest of all for biologists which is 37,000 feet, which is very low compared to everything else where we need a pressure suit of some kind to survive, and so space has always been a backdrop on which we cast both our hopes and fears about technology. Will it make us angels, will it make us devils, will we somehow become more than ourselves through the mediation of technology in that environment?

But then there's a kind of wonderful inversion, which is that the major thing, if you talk to astronauts—which I have a little bit, and Dava, I'm sure, probably even Peter have much more—that the main thing people who go into space talk to you about is the perspective it gives them on the Earth, and there's this world, the very overview effect. Skylab, three astronauts, when they came back, some of the very first Americans to spend significant amounts of time looking at the Earth in space, very under-reported at the time, but they devoted all of their testimonies to Congress, to the importance of ecological thinking, and the kind of understanding of interdependency, and so there's this very interesting inversion between the view of humans onto Earth, not just onto space, which is often, as Peter said, not just what has been or what will be, or even what might be, we use it as a kind of tool to think about our relationship to technology over time, as well as a physical environment, and the actual attitude of people who've been there can primarily to become more preoccupied with the interdependency of all the mechanisms that we have on Earth, which, in a way, really reflects the logic of what she was trying to say.

The last thing I wanted to say very quickly was that there's another image which belongs in the series potentially, which is the nightlights image of the Earth, which was the product or like a side effect, unintended side effect, of the nature of the sensor on the Landsat satellites, which were primarily designed to photograph the Earth in daytime, but it turns out could pick up nighttime illumination, and therefore became one of the primary means we still have to study urbanization. That's very important. And the kind of transformation of the planet, which is, you know, belongs somewhere in there too, in this story.

Benjamin Bratton

Strongly agree. I wanna keep a little bit on time, because a couple of us have to go teach. If we have time, perhaps for a couple questions, give the audience an opportunity to weigh in. I think we have some microphones floating around.

Dava Newman

Can I make a quick comment, please? This is to the connectedness, and going away from this individuality to the connectedness, and the overview effect, when something flips in your brain, and you see, well, let's see, can you see the connections first? When you see the connections, and we're all in this together, rather than “okay, I'm from a certain place,” or rather the individuality, or the specific, that's actually really, it is real, it's had to go to 100%, and the astronauts have come back, because do we have to leave Earth to come back to appreciate our connectedness, and appreciate even the similarities, and those dependencies that are running through all of the comments from very different disciplines. Absolutely. That symbiosis, that symbiosis, that connectedness, and really putting a focus on that. So, hopefully it makes me optimistic. If we can reach, if we can move forward in that direction.

Benjamin Bratton

This is a little bit of what I meant in my talk about the importance of allocentrism, both philosophy and technology, this sort of thing from outside.

All right, I think we have our microphones circulating, and we have a question. It works? Great.

Audience Member 1

Thank you so much for the talk. It is quite interesting to hear all the different viewpoints. I would like to get your thoughts on certain things that I've always found disturbing, is that usually new technology leads to war. For example, the airplane was just basically a bicycle with a small little leaf blower engine with wings in 1903. By 1910, it was dropping bombs. Same thing with a lot of different things. Every kind of technology pretty much first goes to war. Drones 15 years ago were just a toy. Now they're dropping bombs in Ukraine. So, all this technology you're talking about, I don't really hear a lot about war and what it does in your plans.

Also, having been a species that comes out of a colonized country from India, colonization isn't necessarily a good thing. And so there's all this talk about the colonization of Mars and so on. And for me, there's a difference between exploration and colonization. And I'm not really sure there's a reason for colonization, it's a good one. And perhaps could you explain why colonization is important? And there is talk about mining asteroids and things for profit. So, nothing's going to be that easy. There's no free lunch. I'd like to hear your thoughts on that. And also America loves to manifest destiny. So, don't wanna forget that.

Dava Newman

I'd jump in on the Mars because there's, at least from my perspective, there's no intent, I have no good reason that justifies colonization. So, in exploration, we're going out very much for the scientific purposes to find life elsewhere and really teach us about that. I think we've run that experiment. It didn't work out very well for us on Earth. I don't know any reason that we would wanna colonize any other planets or anywhere else. I think that, again, if we could learn from history, that would be a really poor course of action.

And almost the same response quickly to war weaponry. We have a choice. I mean, we've developed the technologies and we do need to choose how they're used. And I think it's really, you know, ethical imperative and moral imperative to have those discussions about how the technology is used. What's it built for, what's it designed for, and what's gonna be the ultimate use of it.

Audience Member 2

Thank you so much for the panel and such intellectually stimulating conversation in touch on so many of these topics. So, I guess this question's not particularly for any speakers. One thing that's really fascinating to me is the taking the picture of the black hole requires a coordination and synthesis all the observatories across the globe and kind of respond to the previous question as well as you get the synthesis of the perspective of the global south, the global north, the west and the east, and it almost illustrates this kind of possibility of unification of the current shattered infosphere and like echo chambers exist on the internet and how Einstein's General Relativity illustrates the frame of reference effects what you see, but however, I feel like among the talk, there seems to be hinting at a planetary or cosmic perspective that is rather singular and also like what Xin Liu had mentioned, it's like when we're seeing through the eye of God, do we mistake us for them? But the word “them” implies a multitude of God or Gods. So, I guess I just want, I don't know how to frame this question, but I would like to hear more thoughts on this multiplicity of perspectives and how the multitude of visions of the future can come together.

Benjamin Bratton

I need to make sure we keep on schedule. I think ending with hope is always a good one, and I hope just that clearly societies always evolve in relation to their cosmologies. And that's maybe what we see emerging. We can continue the conversation in the lobby afterwards. Our next panel, where if this panel, we're sort of emphasizing the planetary side of planetary sapience, the next one emphasizes the sapience one, as Kate mentioned. We are interested in the evolution of intelligence, the artificialization of intelligence, the history of planetary sapience and so forth. I look forward to seeing you then. Thank you so much.

Nick Lindsay

All right, hello, everyone. I'm Nick Lindsay. I'm the Journals and Open Access Director for the MIT Press and my colleague Noah and I are going to say a few very brief words about why the Press is involved in this collaboration with Antikythera. My boss, Amy Brand, who is the Director and Publisher of the Press, very much wanted to be here, but unfortunately, a prior commitment at West is keeping her away.

We've had a very long standing connection with this building and with the media lab that goes all the way back to the beginning of both organizations in the person of Muriel Cooper, who was the Press's first design director as well as a founding member of the Media Lab. Muriel's influence is both broad and deep on the press and the lab. And if you've seen-- actually, I'm sure you've seen the MIT Press colophon because it's been on the screen numerous times today. That spirit of playfulness and innovation that she brought to our work is clearly evident and we strive every day at the press to live up to Muriel's example.

There are many touch points between the press and the media lab over the years, including the Journal of Design and Science, otherwise known as JODS, which was launched in February 2018 and continued on until July 2020. JODS aimed to bridge the gap between design and science, fostering interdisciplinary dialogue, and challenging traditional academic silos. The Journal was hosted on an open access, open peer-reviewed platform called PubPub from the Knowledge Futures Group, an organization that actually grew out of both the Media Lab and the Press, and is now a separate, thriving 501(c)(3). And they offered services and tools to encourage community participation and rich multimedia content, which is something that we hadn't been able to do up until that time. So that combination of the Press and the Media Lab really caused us or gave us this opportunity to be able to do something different.

In 2016, the press had the privilege of publishing Benjamin Bratton's seminal work The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. This groundbreaking book challenges us to rethink how we view various genres of computation, as it really became a pillar of MIT Press's backlist, having sold many thousands of copies.

The Stack is the kind of book that the press has been and continues to be known for.

As Bruce Sterling aptly described it, "Benjamin Bratton's The Stack is a strange, marvelous text of great conceptual beauty. The Stack itself may or may not exist, but it's left everything that came before it in a state of rubble." That's the kind of destruction we like in MIT Press.

Since the publication of The Stack, our relationship with Bratton has grown significantly and we've extended our collaboration to include Antikythera, leading to the creation of a new journal and book series that furthers our shared vision and builds off our past experience with JODS to a certain degree. The new journal embodies our joint commitment to innovation, pushing boundaries, and fostering open knowledge. Moreover, it underscores our dedication to interdisciplinary research, bringing together diverse fields to address complex challenges.

At MIT Press, we've always been at the forefront of publishing, consistently driving forward-thinking initiatives. Our innovative approach has led to numerous pioneering projects and publications that challenge conventional boundaries and explore new frontiers. We are particularly committed to digital publishing and emerging technologies, ensuring that our content is accessible and engaging in the digital age and our collaboration with Antikythera and the launch of the new journal and book series really represents a significant step forward in that endeavor.

I think at MIT Press, we're really looking forward to what we're going to learn from this collaboration. So through these efforts, we aim to foster a community of thinkers and doers who are committed to advancing knowledge in new and surprising ways and driving positive change.

With that, I'll turn it over to you, Noah.

Noah Springer

Thanks, Nick.

Hello, everybody. Good afternoon. My name is Noah Springer. I'm the acquiring editor for New Media, Digital Humanities, Game Studies, Human-Computer Interaction, and Design at the MIT Press. It's a mouthful. But you might know me better as the acquisitions editor for the Antikythera series.

Benjamin and I first started talking about this series a couple of years ago and he kind of positioned it in a relationship to his research, but then also broadening it out. And it was because of the success of The Stack, of course, that we said, oh, what else can we do with Benjamin? But given that we are committed to interdisciplinary knowledge, boundary-pushing, forward-looking scholarship, the Antikythera series just felt like such a good fit.

As we've seen throughout today and during the keynote, the fields that are combined within the series are just incredibly far-reaching. Computer science, architecture, philosophy, design, various sections of the humanities, as well as even science fiction, right? Especially Stanisław Lem, clearly the patriot saint of the series, has really shown that its alignment with both by a specific list but the press at large is really significant and kind of overwhelmingly along the same sort of agenda. And so when Benjamin and I started talking about this, we really thought that it was just such an important part to combine our efforts and really find a way to have the proper publishing avenues for the book series, as well as the journal.

The first book in the series, as you may have heard already, is by Blaise Aguera y Arcas, which is called What Is Intelligence? is coming out next fall. You've seen the sample already. It's really emblematic of what the book series is gonna be, what the Antikythera is gonna be, where Blaise is combining biology, chemistry, continental philosophy, neuroscience, and physics to help us understand the relationship between life and intelligence and where they collide and why that's important to understand in sort of an ethical sense of how we start to live and continue to live. So I really think this is gonna be a transformative book and it's gonna be boundary-pushing.

The series itself is gonna continue to do some more stuff with the other projects that we have in the pipeline. So all I say, I'm really impressed, I'm energized by the research and the massive output that has been generated already by Antikythera and I can't wait to see where this goes. I really love the enthusiasm we'll see by this group of people at MIT and the broader Antikythera space. I think it's been really exciting. So I'm proud to be partnered with them and the book series. I look forward to the long and successful partnership.

And finally, I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't throw a quick plug for the MIT Press Bookstore and our bookshop outside. So if you haven't already, please stop by.

We have Will selling our books as well as a couple other books. You'll recognize names from the fields represented here as well as some other MIT faculty and things like that. If you don't see something you like there, go check out the bookstore as well.

I will never go home without trying to sell a book.

All I have to say: thanks for everyone for attending and welcome to our next panel. Thanks.

Benjamin Bratton

Thank you, Noah and Nick. Just as happy to be working with MIT Press, the enthusiasm is mutual.

As mentioned at the conclusion of the previous session, this session emphasizes the sapience side of the planetary sapience conjunction. I should say that, firstly, Sara Walker will not be able to join us today, so we will represent assembly theory in her stead as best as we can.

Once again, let me specify a little bit of our perspective and position in some of the animating questions we have around this topic as a way of hopefully teeing up discussions just as interesting or even more so than the previous, before I introduce our guests.

One way to think about this question of the planetarity of intelligence might be this way: to consider that over billions of years Earth folded its matter to produce the very specific kind of thing, the biological and indeed now non-biological creatures capable not only of craft and cunning, but also feats of scientific and artistic abstraction. All of which are ultimately theologic in origin. Now, in our moment, machines now behave and communicate intelligently in ways that were once reserved for precocious primates. Emerging from the evolution of complex life, a stable biosphere and intricate perceptual and cognitive organs, intelligence is both planetary in scope and in origin. It is both contingent and convergent as we have seen, and yet it does and always will take many forms, passing through 14 stages of embodiment, complexity and eventually even sometimes partial self-awareness.

Over the past last century, as we have seen in each of the days that we have been together, the Earth has grown something like an artificial crust of satellites and data centers and trans-oceanic cables, through which it has realized, continues to realize, incipient forms of animal machinic hybrid cognition with terraforming scale agency.

Now, as I mentioned on Wednesday, our interest in this is not only in what these kinds of planetary technologies can do, but equally as much if not more so in what it is that they tell us about themselves, about the universe and indeed about us, and many of the things that it tells us are not necessarily good news. About all of those things on the list.

Planetary scale computation has allowed for the sensing and modeling of climate change, for example, as our example, and thus informed the conception of an “Anthropocene”, and all of its existential reckonings. Part of the irony in this in a way is that humans or some subset of humans have been terraforming the Earth for at least centuries before we understood that this was happening through the disclosures of planetary computation.

In other words, agency preceded subjectivity. Which is not always the way we teach it in our philosophy classes, but it may be where we should be looking in a way to hone and make more specific the questions that we ask. Humans and the species and systems that they were cultivated by, again, had been terraforming this planet for a very, very long time.

Through these artificial organs for monitoring our own processes that we continue to increasingly rely upon. There we also find not only ways of media through which we can know things. Once again, they themselves, those computational systems, are also capable of tremendous feats of cognition. Part of the question to be asked is: “What are the possible dynamics between these two forms of intelligence?” Ultimately, not only how have they co-evolved together, but how may they co-evolve in the future and what our role in orienting that might be.

Planetary systems, both large and small, that is inclusive of human societies, have evolved the capacity to self-model and perhaps hopefully self-orient in one way or another. Part of the themes that you'll hear throughout this particular panel has to do with these dynamics of evolution. Evolution not only as the process through which we have all arrived here, but also the process both divergent and convergent that will define the future in which, that we are both deliberately and accidentally composing at the present. It's that tension, if you like, or the perhaps paradox, between both the natural and unguided and blind forces of evolution and the, as I'm discussing on Wednesday, the increasingly intense capacities for artificialization, which is in many ways highly guided, it becomes the way to question and perhaps understand the scope of that predicament. All of which our speakers today will address in unique and specific ways.

Let me then, with that, introduce each of the speakers in turn, and then we'll ask them to introduce a little bit of the work that they've been doing with Antikythera, part of the thinking. I think you'll see, like this morning, a way in which the mosaic comes to form in that process of thinking together.

To my immediate left is Blaise Agüera y Arcas, who, as Nick and Noah mentioned, is the author of the first book in the Antikythera book series—What Is Intelligence?, designed by James Goggin, and also the author of What Is Life?, the extraordinary little book that you have on your chair, and Blaise will be discussing both of these in some detail. Blaise is an artificial intelligence researcher, software engineer, software architect, and author. He is the CTO of technology and society at Google, and also leads a team working on fundamental AI research called Paradigms of Intelligence. He also founded the Artist and Machine Intelligence Group at Google some time ago.

Before he joined Google in 2013, Agüera y Arcas was an engineer at Microsoft, and the architect of Bing Maps and Bing Mobile, Agüera y Arcas has published several multiple scientific articles, essays, op-eds, and books, including Ubi Sunt and Who Are We Now, both of which are available outside, and, again, the forthcoming What Is Intelligence?, which you'll hear about this evening.

To Blaise's left is Stephanie Sherman. Stephanie Sherman is the director, writer, and strategist who designs and develops collaborative systems across technology, urbanism, and culture.

Her research focuses on speculative histories, organizational architecture, platform automation, which you'll hear a lot about today, and urban AI. She holds a BA in English from Penn, MA in philosophy from Duke, and PhD, which we first worked together on at UC San Diego. She's also the associate director of the Antikythera program, and directs the MA in narrative environments in the Spatial Practices program at Central Saint Martins.

To her, immediate left is Robert Pietrusko. Robert Pietrusko is a designer, composer, and educator. His research focus is on geographic representation and the history of spatial data sets, he will share much of this with us today. His design work, quite extraordinary, is part of the permanent collection of the Fondation Cartier in Paris, has been exhibited in many countries and venues, such as MoMA, ZKM, the Venice Architecture Biennale, among others. Recordings of his sound art have been released in various famed experimental labels as well. He'll share also a bit of his current book project, High Contrast: False Color Landscapes of the Cold War, as a part of the history of planetary sapience that we'll also kind of explore, which is the real expertise of Thomas Moynihan, to his left, who is an intellectual historian at Cambridge.

He works on the history of ideas, primarily the ways that changing theories about the wider universe have transformed human self-conceptions and practical priorities, which in many ways was where we concluded the last panel, and how those build a sense of our placement within the wider ranges of space and time and natural history, indeed, where cosmology and cosmology may come together. He holds a DPhil from Oriel College at Oxford, previously Visiting Research Associate at History, at St Benet's College at Oxford. His prior work focused on the historical development of notions surrounding human extinction and global catastrophe, discovery of the very idea of extinction, actually. Currently he's working on a project exploring how history's horizons have expanded throughout the past, present and future. He's the author of two really extraordinary works, X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction, and Spinal Catastrophism.

Very happy to have you all here.

With that, let me pass you the clicker, and we'll begin with my good friend Blaise Agüera y Arcas, who'll start us off.

Blaise Agüera y Arcas

Thank you so much, Benjamin. I'm really glad to be here, and it's a great honor to be inaugurating the book series and helping kick-off the Antikythera Journal.

Benjamin and I have been working together for a number of years at the intersections of AI and speculative design and planetary thinking. And so the book that you all hopefully have picked up a copy of on your seats is a collaboration with James Goggin, and Marie Otsuka, and Minkyoung Kim, and Johan Michalove, several of whom are in the audience now.

To really explore two coupled questions, so What Is Life? is essentially chapter one of the longer What Is Intelligence? book that MIT Press will be publishing next year. So think 10x of this — that’s What Is Intelligence? After we'd already gone to print with it, and this was done, we just decided we were gonna put out the little book two months ago, so we pulled it together pretty quickly as a standalone object.

As probably many of you know, it's not the first of its name. In 1944, Erwin Schrödinger, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, made a book called What Is Life as well, it was roughly the same size, and originally the plan was for What Is Intelligence? to be about the same size as Schrödinger's book. So overshot the mark a little bit.

But we thought, why not take chapter one, which really is about artificial life and about life more broadly, and its connection with intelligence and the way life and intelligence are really continuous with each other and break it out into a little Schrödinger-size book of its own. So that's what you've got on your seats. We printed a thousand of them and maybe we can convince MIT Press to actually put them on sale at some point. In negotiation.

But anyway, after we'd already gone to print with a little book, Benjamin pointed out that I actually hadn't answered the question “what is life?” with the definition of life in this book, nor had I answered the question “what is intelligence?” in a bigger one, so the manuscript is revised, but the definitions are not in this book, so I wanted to offer them here.

Life, as I see it, is the computational phase of matter arising from evolutionary selection for dynamic stability, and intelligence is the ability to model, predict, and influence one's future, evolving in relation to other intelligences to create a larger symbiotic intelligence. In order to make sense of either of these definitions, I thought I would just take a couple of minutes and walk through the basic argument made in this book without getting too long into it.

First of all, the little book begins with abiogenesis, with the origins of life on Earth. Obviously we don't really know what the origins of life were on Earth. How exactly this whole thing happened about four billion years ago, the earliest possible moment that it could be in the Hadean period, probably. As soon as there were seas on Earth and there was chemistry that could start to catalyze itself, there are two competing accounts.

One of them holds that RNA came first, and the other one holds that metabolism came first. My belief is that talking about one of them as the origin of life is probably the wrong way to think about it, because in reality, life is a process of what Lynn Margulis called symbiogenesis, meaning the combinations of things in order to make larger things or the composition of functions. The moment you start to have molecules that can catalyze each other's production, in other words, where A can combine with B, and B can combine with C, and then C combines with D, and also makes some A, you start to have feedback loops. One recent scientific paper called this Molecules in Mutualism.

When you start to have such feedback loops, then they can in turn mesh together, almost like cogs, to create a larger whole that in turn can persist more robustly than the parts can on their own. Then that becomes a thing, which can in turn engage in mutualism with other such things, and it's through a cascade of such symbiotic mergers that life emerges. The bottom layer of that is just chemicals combining and forming these little loops. In fact, even that may not be the bottom layer.

If you really think about the idea that life and, you know, Kate Hayles talked about this this morning, life is really about perpetuating, about its own persistence over time. Even something as simple as an electron or a quark is really just a stable object that can persist in time. We don't really know what the basement layer of physics is, maybe it's quantum field theory, maybe it's strings, maybe it's some other thing that we don't understand, but we know that many things are possible at that very bottom layer that are not realized, and that the things that we do see realized are the things that have persisted.

If you think about it, that persistence and the fact that those persistent things can in turn combine to form things that themselves persist, you know, the way quarks combine to form nucleons and nucleons and electrons combine to form atoms, and atoms combine to form molecules, and molecules combine to form polymers and so on. It's kind of the same story all the way down.

In that sense, evolution, if you think about it in terms of dynamic stability, might be a much bigger story than biology, and might even account for the anthropic principle, meaning that physicists have talked about the anthropic principle in terms of apparent fine tuning of the universe for life, but they may have things backwards, in the sense that there may be many, many possible universes in which things can persist.

When those things persist, combined to form things that can persist better, then that life as we know it may be the outcome of an evolutionary process that is automatic, under very, very general conditions. So, what are those really general conditions?

Well, we know something about life and its computational nature, and we've known it for a long time, since von Neumann in the 1940s, 1950s, but this isn't well appreciated. So, Alan Turing and John von Neumann are really the heroes, in some sense, of this book.

They both are known, of course, as the parents of computer science, and also of AI. The Turing test has become very famous in the last few years, as sort of an objective, functional measure of when we achieve intelligence. Intelligence is as intelligence does. I guess I think of myself as a functionalist as well, in the sense that the way things function in their environment, in their context, is ultimately what we mean when we talk about something being intelligent.

What is not so well known is that both Turing and von Neumann were also theoretical biologists. They, in a way, found theoretical biology, too, and von Neumann's contribution to that field was the idea of self-reproducing automaton. A self-reproducing automaton is a robot that paddles around on a pond, where there are lots of Legos floating around, and it assembles those Legos to form another copy of itself, which is a remarkable thing for a machine to be able to do.

There's something a little bit paradoxical about the idea of something literally building something as complex as it itself is, but of course that's exactly what a bacteria is, or what any other form of life is. The paradox of life, in part, is the paradox of being able to make something as complex as you yourself are. What von Neumann realized is that that would require having a tape, having an instruction tape, with instructions for building yourself, inside yourself, and then having what he called a machine A, that would follow the instructions on that tape in order to assemble the Legos into yourself, and also having a machine B that would copy the tape itself, and finally, the instructions for building machine A and machine B have to also be on the tape. If those conditions are met, then you have a self-reproducing machine.

Now, he came up with this idea before the structure and function of DNA was discovered, but of course he called it exactly right. DNA is that tape. And machine A, by the way, is a Turing machine, so there is literally a computer at the heart of anything that is alive and that can evolve. This is evolvable in the sense that modifications makes the tape persist through the generations as we have a basis for evolution to happen.

What you see here, the video that you see playing on the left is an experiment that will go into some detail, and I won't go into detail here because we don't have time for it, but it's a computational experiment of how abiogenesis happens, how it is that function and purpose arise from pure randomness. In this case, that happens via a bunch of tapes in a soup. Those tapes begin with random bytes on them, so with no structure and no function whatsoever, and the only thing that happens is that you take two tapes and join them and then run it as if it's code, and then take them back apart and put them back in the soup and repeat, and when you repeat millions of times, programs emerge. They are quite complex and it takes some time to reverse engine. And their function is to reproduce. Reproduction comes about automatically because that's a way that something can persist through time. If you have something that can reproduce, then you're likely to see it again in the future is much lower than if something that can reproduce.

The importance of the stability of reproduction is actually one and the same as the second law of thermodynamics, which is kind of the answer to the puzzle that Schrodinger posed in the 1944 book What Is Life?

His puzzle was: how could life exist in a universe where everything tends toward the stability of randomness? And the answer is something that has a model of itself and that can reproduce itself can push back against the second law and actually creates order and structure in the world. But it's actually just another form of the second law, just one in which you think about the stability of cycles rather than just the stability of fixed points.

When you combine that with the idea of symbiosis, where the things that have solved that problem of perpetuating themselves can combine to perpetuate jointly even better than the things can on their own, now you get the ladder of complexification.

That tells you not only why life arises in the first place, but why life becomes more and more complex.

Finally, intelligence is what happens when something that is able to compute is able to not only make copies of itself, or grow, or reproduce, but is also able to form a model of itself and its environment, and is able to predict itself actively into future existence. Again, Kate Hayles said this extremely well, that intelligence is the ability to form a model of yourself and the environment jointly and auto-complete yourself into existence in the future.

And the more sophisticated the symbioses that bring together intelligent entities, the higher order and longer term that prediction can become, a process which Benjamin and I think both believe has become planetary at this point in the end.

Always was.

You know, it's been said sometimes: “LLMs or chatbots are just auto-complete.” I agree with that statement, except for the word “just.” I think that life itself is auto-complete. We are auto-complete, and, in a sense, auto-complete is a lot more than we have heretofore understood. Even phenomena like consciousness can be understood in terms of a self-model that arises through social interaction and through the mind that's what's self.

Those are some of the points that are made in the bigger What Is Intelligence? book. So, moving on.

Benjamin Bratton

Stephanie will speak to the auto in auto-complete.

Stephanie Sherman

Hi, everyone. My contribution to Antikythera's new journal with MIT Press is called Auto: Fordian Prehistory as a Planetary Platform Automation, and the project follows the planetary pivot towards mass automated platform production on the Fordian assembly line in 1908 through to the coining of the term "automation" in 1947 at Ford Motors. And the project operates as a speculative robot history.

In the words of Emmanuel Delanda, "Exploring how the persistent pathologies and latent possibilities of this era shape automated intelligence and the future of physicalized AI, such as autonomous vehicles we have today and for those to come," and in general, it uses the kind of paradigm of auto-mobility to question the basic paradox, dare I say, fetish, at the heart of the auto more broadly. A phenomenon that sort of suggests always independence, but that really always refers to an interdependence that controls the independent reproducibility.

The project takes on these two terms, platform and automation, and puts them together.

Firstly, platforms. Platforms, you probably think of them, are recognized as apps that match two-sided markets or software systems. But the project kind of thinks about platforms as a general systems type that traverses geology, architecture and infrastructure, communications and stage. Platforms exhibit particular logics and dynamics that we can see playing out across all these different typologies. They use standardization and homogenization to flatten complexity into a foundational layer, which then generates further complexity. They combine seemingly contradictory patterns of consolidation and rupture, performance and persistence, centralization and decentralization, not as opposites but as a hybrid. And in Sara Walker's parlance, platforms create what we might think of as scaffolds that allow other things to emerge and appear.

Secondly, automation. Automation is typically understood as a form of substitution of human labor by machine. But following Bucky Fuller, we can follow the definition of automation more expansively as a general evolutionary principle, whereby an action in a process that was once debated or deliberated in each instance gets resolved and solidified over time into protocols, so that parts of the process function without a human operator, independently.

According to Fuller, biological and ecological systems, planetary systems are all already automated, and rather than seeing automation as a function of human replacement, we might view automation as a logic of delegation, cascading functions as to who and what does what and what roles they play.

Ford, Fordism and the automotive complex they wrought demonstrate well the persistence and pathologies of the systematic arrangement.

Platform automation at planetary scale developed through evolutionary technological iteration, not only auto-poetically and unthoughtfully generated a planetary machine space of pervasive auto-mobility machines, it also set in motion the same factory scale principles that eventually give rise to computation and simulation. Probing that history from a post-human perspective, it produces, in a robot historian sense, it presents parables and primal scenes of precursors to automated intelligence.

For example, now with our purview, we might view workers on the assembly line as humans playing at being machines, a shift that precedents the shift from cars as once machines to autonomous diverse networks of robots.

The bigger implication of the project is this, rather than think about autonomous vehicles per se as individual agents of control and decision, we probably want to think about them as swarms of a vast distributed mobile urban sensing apparatus: computer nodes that humans ride in connected to the computational city and planet that occupy an infrastructural machine space that we've built, a platform that we have now precedented that we can't take away on a new automated stage.

The key diagnostic that drives the project that we might take into the new formations of automated intelligence as we think about them is seeing the design challenge not as that of designing a device, but rather as design of the environment and the kinds of constraints that if we focused on the environment rather than the individual agent or device might afford and generate.

Looking back on platform auto mobility and towards the future of physicalized AI and the shape of autonomous vehicles of hopefully all sizes and shapes begs us to consider intelligence not only as the capacity for decision and models that can adapt to various environments, but autonomous intelligence as an embedded environmental ecology, a sort of platform unconscious that exchanges rigidity for certain virtuosity. In this way, the passive platform automation can manifest the most grand forms of ecological intelligence or utter stupidity as the automotive complex perhaps shows us. These dynamics start to map the challenges for the sapience unfolding before us.

Robert Gerard Pietrusko

Hi everyone.

Like Nicholas this morning, I'm of that class of designer who has this compulsion to historicize, so there's going to be a lot of that here, a lot of throwback stuff, but also throwback to the morning session, a bit of a recapitulation of some of the things that my specific interest about how knowledge of the planet was also tied up and entangled with using the planet to derive knowledge of other things. So the planet as an epistemic thing, if I might call it that.

I'm specifically interested in the landscape that thickened 2.5 dimensional surface of the Earth, and specifically how it's been used by ecologists and military strategists alike as a communication channel through which otherwise inaccessible information might flow. This is part of a project that Benjamin alluded to earlier that I've been working on for the last several years where I'm trying to understand the remoteness of the term remote sensing.

Far more than a synonym for just distance or altitude, remoteness is an epistemological category. It's a designation of inaccessibility that came from the geopolitical blockages and desires for planet-scale information that emerged during the Cold War.

To drill into that just a little bit: it's a term that was coined in 1961 by Evelyn Pruitt in an otherwise unremarkable budget meeting about a series of reconnaissance projects over the last decade in the 50s, and she meant it very much the way that I'm talking about it now, inaccessibility and the problems of planetary scale.

Crucial for this work is vegetation. I'm interested in the vegetal landscapes depicted in aerial photographs and the ones that preceded more contemporary remote sensing systems. Specifically how vegetation shaped the knowledge derived from these images and how vegetation became a communication channel within a larger chain of information capture and processing. In my analysis, interpretation of remotely sensed images had a particularly botanical flavor. This has to do with actual botanists working on it. One that informed early models of human decision making and cognition, as we'll see, and also informed techniques of pattern recognition that remain with us today.

Over the last decade I've been looking at the early years of the Cold War when botanists collaborated with US intelligence analysts and used plants and tree species as surrogates for information about politically inaccessible landscapes. I'm going to quickly describe one aspect of this work at three, I'll present them separately, but these are three highly interconnected sites and scales.

So three sites, three scales, three slides.

This is site and scale one, we call it the planet. Scale one to 100 million, more or less, I don't know. How's that, big enough?

Naturalists have long recognized that at the global scale, similar patterns of climate, elevation, geology, etc. result in similar vegetal cover wherever they occur on the globe. This is, you know, many of you probably know this. And it's resulted in the concept of natural regions. We see these maps all the time.

Now during the early Cold War, however, these findings had a new significance. The US military anticipated a ground war with the Soviet Union and required information about the Eurasian landscape, but of course they couldn't access it.

Botanists and geographers documented how vegetation covered vast territories with extents that ran completely indifferent to geopolitical boundaries and borders, and we see that here, the similarity in East and West in these images. Observing where similar vegetal patterns existed in the East and West, botanists created numerous test sites in North America that served as proxies for specific locations in the Soviet Union. They believed that militarily useful knowledge derived from plant cover in these very specific sites would also be applicable to the denied territories of the Sino-Soviet bloc.

Okay, next, site to the ground.

This is roughly one to 20,000 scale. I'm talking about vegetation as information, but for these folks, what useful information could actually be gathered by vegetation? What could vegetation provide?

Vegetation created a second proxy at a radically different scale. From an aerial perspective, vegetation seemingly obscures the ground. It seems evident as an optical thing. But plant and tree species also communicate many qualities of the ground that they cover: things like slope, soil type, moisture, and firmness. They even reveal characteristics that are not visible to either a grounded or aerial observer. These are things like the depth of permafrost or the height of the water table. Importantly for analysts at the time, all of these characteristics that I just described were seen as militarily useful because they affected mobility.

At each of the North American test sites, and we have some evidence of them here, botanists created strict correlations between vegetal cover and underlying terrain qualities. We can think of these as early associative models, right? This kind of very strict correlation between plants and what they would reveal.

At the same time, photo interpreters made strict correlations between plant names on the one hand and the tones and textures that you see in the aerial photographs here. Based on these correlations, analysts believe that aerial photos of vegetation could be used to map military terrain anywhere in the world without ever having to access the ground.

All right, so we have these test cases at one scale that produce vast territories when deployed, and that brings us to site and scale three, which I'm calling the interpretation lab. We’ll say that this is at one to one.

The correlations between photographic patterns of plants and their underlying terrain conditions were codified in diagnostic keys.

And it was great that Blaise, in your slide of What Is Intelligence?, you showed one of these keys actually, not one from this context, but that diagram of a series of binary demarcations of this versus that, a sort of decision tree. Each of these keys led a photo interpreter, step by step, through a series of yes-no decisions about the visual sensation that they were experiencing when looking at the photographs. They don't know anything about plants, but they can register if the texture is this dark or this light, if the texture is mottled or something else, and after going through this chain of binary decisions, the plant species that they classified is revealed, and the resulting ground condition is said to be met.

Now, of course, naturalists had long used diagnostic keys to identify plants themselves, but the technique was now extrapolated to aerial altitudes and applied to photographic gray tones, and in short, it became an algorithm for rapid information processing that allowed unskilled interpreters with no botanical expertise to act as sensors and to classify thousands of aerial photographs pre-computer.

Now, this had two results that are relevant to concerns, I think, hopefully today, stitching together a little bit of the planetary and the sapience.

First, this directly informed the development of decision tree analysis, one of the first pattern recognition techniques developed in the 60s. And classifying remotely sensed images was one of the first problem domains for these algorithms. There's a very clear historical lineage between these projects and those algorithms later.

And then second, it changed our understanding of what it meant to even map a landscape at the regional or planetary scale. A literal map was no longer necessary or even the goal. It was now replaced by a classification procedure, or we might say an algorithm that was informed by vegetal proclivities, and this algorithm could be deployed as needed.

From the standpoint of a military apparatus that required terrain information at a global scale, regions were said to be mapped if a vegetal diagnostic key for it had been created, and then only the decision algorithm was necessary to produce terrain information anywhere in the world.

This for me means that relationship between the natural landscape is kind of an epistemological thing or an epistemic thing that produces planetary scale and relates to models of cognition at the time.

We might, many of you probably know this better than me, but of course, like the atomic bit of information is the ability to make a decision as Shannon describes it. And it's precisely that understanding of yes / no, zero / one that's embedded in these diagnostic keys. So hopefully the short vignette suggests a little bit of my curiosity about how cultures of vegetality preceded and informed early cultures of digitality.

Thank you.

Thomas Moynihan

Hi, thank you all for being here, and thank you to Antikythera and MIT for hosting some absolutely mesmerizing presentations so far: peeping into a black hole, witnessing abiogenesis, car crashes in GTA. Yeah, absolutely mesmerizing. I'm going to end with a scatter plot graph. I don't want to undersell it.

Our species is the first to ask and begin answering the question, where is “now”? That is, how much past is required to produce our living present and how much future might be left ahead waiting to be produced. Such questions are important.

We are orienting creatures, we seek to know the world and our place within it in order to better navigate our way through it. Obviously, one way to orient ourselves is to seek our place in space. We now know that we live on a planet that is pirouetting around a star, that's one amongst many in a galaxy, that's one amongst many. But as you can see here, another way to seek orientation is to seek our place in time.

This is a crucial consideration because time is the medium within which actions come to matter, within which what comes before comes to influence everything thereafter. So figuring out the ambit of influence of how far it stretches behind and ahead is a crucial decisive factor. If I knew I was going to die tomorrow, I probably wouldn't bother securing a mortgage today.

Such chains of reasoning need to be extended now beyond ourselves as individuals up to us as a planetary collective, given that we are now, as a species, a planetary agent of change potentially dictating the entire future for the biosphere. But answers to the question for where we are in time have obviously changed over time. This project aims to visualize this. So some backstory here.

Over the years, in my travels to the archives researching the history of ideas, whenever I came across someone making a prediction off the cuff, or perhaps more seriously, about how much past there was behind, how much future might be ahead, based on extrapolations from physical process, I recorded it. Over time, this amassed into quite a large data set. And so eventually I asked myself, well, how could I visualize this? How can I communicate this? And so what we have here in the center is my back of the napkin prototype of how this might work.

We have the central axis, and this is plotting human history: so 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, up to our present, and I think of this as a series of consecutive nows, consecutive present moments. Then stretching out from this below and above are those contemporary predictions on how large the past was, and how large the present was.

I'm very far from a data visualizer. I have no skills in this department. But using the crude tools available to me, aka Microsoft Excel, I tried to put this data set into a graph.

Here's the scatterplot. And so here on the left, you can see the first attempt at this. I've got, as the key shows, nested types of predictions. Along the bottom, developing predictions of the age of the universe as a whole, and then above that, age of the Earth, some other ones that I can skip. And up to the top in the future, predictions on the future habitability of Earth. And at the very top, predictions of how long this universe writ large can host complicated life.

In the center here, we have a bit of a zoomed in closeup that can give you some sense in what I was trying to do here, because I guess, you know, the text is pretty small there.

I should say the one on the left is the logarithmic scale. So that was me trying to fit all this onto one screen. Because as you can see, the one behind me on the right is non-log.

I think that you can see from that just how much our sense of how long the future might be has ballooned in the past century. Given, I would say, the coming of age of cosmology, and it's increasingly eye-watering predictions for how long this cosmos as a whole might be able to host complicated things like you and me.

Again, as I say, I am far from a data visualizer, so the kind people at Antikythera have partnered me with Lisa Strausfeld of Informationart, an absolutely masterful information architect, to create, to make this into not just a workable object, something that can fit on the screen, but also an appealing one.

Here is the visual identity that Lisa has so far produced for what this is eventually going to be alongside the working title The History of Now, which is more or less self-explanatory, and actually, I owe it to Benjamin—you were the one that suggested that title in a conversation.

We've decided that the vertical axis is now going to be the human history axis, and so as you scroll down, you're scrolling through human history, and as that goes by various predictions, contemporary predictions, for how long the past was and how long the future might be, will stretch left and right, respectively.

As you scroll through human history, these will compile these different predictions, and eventually the user will get a synoptic sense of how our sense of our position within time has itself changed over time. The final product will have text, as you scroll through on your journey, narrating the major step changes, and the key discoveries in science that have forced major shifts in our sense of where we are in time's wider expanses, alongside images of contemporary illustrations of the physical processes involved, be it planetary accretion or the Big Bang in the past, and various speculative kill mechanisms putting upper bounds on Earth's future invisibility in the future. And so, I guess, yeah, we all are conscious of our own biographies. We have a sense of their probable bookends and the placement of our current moment within them. And I think that's a very important part of what makes us such potent agents.

If, as Antikythera argues, we as a species are a conduit of an emerging, coalescing form of planetary intelligence, it's only right that we bequeath the globe itself a similar aptitude. This project aims to chart that process of how, through us, the planet itself becomes conscious of its own unfolding biography. I think it should be something special.

Thank you.

Benjamin Bratton

Thank you all so much, mesmerizing. Thank you all for these.

I'll try to kick things off, and quite similarly to that I did in the previous panel, some of the links that I'm beginning to see to the questions here as well, and then we can throw it to you all, and you'll kick the ball back and forth, and I'm sure it’ll be sort of fun.

The question of scaffolding—John Maynard Smith, maybe is in this as well. It has something to do with the things that persist and therefore become components and yet more complex things.

One of the phrases I think each of you said at one point was further complexity. Complexity begets complexity, which begets complexity. The conjugation of form over time is one in which not only does this pass through these sort of threshold phases, but the previous scaffold persist. They persist through this entire dynamic, and they become in a way a stable component, which allows for auto-complete, automation, all these sorts of things to literally repeat themselves over time. Persistence is repetition in this way.

I was also taken by the phrase that you said very quickly, Stephanie, about physicalized AI, which is also something we look at in the cognitive infrastructure studio about how we may be very quickly passing through the end of the phase in which we may have thought of and conceived of AI as a kind of disembodied brain in a box, a kind of voice in a petri dish, but rather something that is animating things in the world, which will then undertake their own kind of complex evolutionary dynamic on their own and that link between the physical and the virtual.

What I think you said was also that the ways in which there was a kind of physical form of computation of automation with the assembly line that established a kind of platform logic of automating component parts, which then gave rise to the possibility of the forms of planetary computation on which obviously the supposedly virtual things exist, which then is falling back into the physicalization like a physical process, the virtual process and the physical process and they work together. One is scaffold, the other in place as well. Totally fascinated by the kind of secret history of AI landscape photography and the kind of structures of incremental decisions that this work is.

The thing I want to sort of leave with is the last, I think, thing we might want to touch on is the question of the future and the ways in which each of you deal with this as well.

If Sara were here, one of the things that she would like to contribute to that discussion is the argument that within assembly theory the most complex things in the world are the ones that contain within them the greatest number of scaffolds. Therefore, they are the ones that contain in them the greatest number of steps needed to be taken for them to exist. Therefore, the most complex things are the technosphere, or the thing that contains the most evolutionary time within it. And then in that strange sense, they are the oldest things in this regard.

But the way in which she would describe the future then is it's something by definition is more complex. The increased further complexity is the same thing as futurity and the futurity is the same thing as the future.

Now, you talk about futurity as one of the terms in your fundamental definition of intelligence. The ability to predict, not the state in which the agent is in, but the potential counterfactual future states to predict the future or model the future and to craft choose between it. So complexity equals futurity, futurity equals intelligence.

There's some sort of way in which these things are converging and aligning in strange ways. I wonder if anyone who wants to jump in and find a thread, please do so.

Blaise Agüera y Arcas

This is a great series of threads and provocations, I think.

One of the things that appeals to me most about how Sara talks about assembly theory is this idea of things that are most complex today also being the oldest, in addition to being the most recent. They occupy a very thin bit of history and very recent past, but they also are the deepest in the sense that they are the most contingent on a deep history, and the deep history is still always there.

This is an idea that I feel like in a way has become a little old fashioned because it's sort of the idea of progress. It now sounds kind of mid 20th century, like we're so over progress. And I think that that's a real loss of understanding of something very basic.

I'm thinking about the way, for example, Stephen Jay Gould has spoken about no thing being more evolved than any other living thing. We've all been evolving for four billion years, so everything is of equal age.

It's not true. It is literally not true.

We are colonies of eukaryotic cells, which are themselves composed out of two: out of a bacterium and archaean each. Those smaller things were like matryoshka dolls, and the inner versions of that, the more you zoom in, the deeper in time you look. That's true even for the ribosome, for instance.

There's a beautiful recent work showing that the core of the ribosome is the oldest part and it's the most evolutionarily conserved and there have been layers added to the outside of the ribosome. You can date the evolution of the ribosome kind of geometrically as distance from the core.

That makes sense because any innovation has to rely on a combination of existing parts, which is also one of the reasons that we always get simultaneous discovery in science and in technology. There are many, many famous examples. The light bulb is one of them. It was multiply invented about a dozen times in the span of a few years and is subject to a lot of lawsuits because of that. Why did it seem like everybody was in telepathic communication at this moment and they all invented the light bulb at the same time?

Well, it's because you can't have a light bulb without having electricity and without being able to draw metal filaments and be able to make a vacuum and blow glass. The moment you have all of those parts, it's almost inevitable that that set of ideas is going to recombine in this form.

Of course, it takes intelligence to do it because we're not just in a world where glass and filaments and electricity are bumping around the way molecules did at the bottom of the sea four billion years ago randomly combining. Once there's any intelligent being that is exposed to all of those things and has a bit of imagination will come up with it. And it couldn't have happened earlier because the pieces weren't there.

Benjamin Bratton

This connects in a group with something that Thomas works on, which is the dynamic, fragile balance, between path dependency and contingency. What you're talking about is a kind of path against certain scaffold structure in a certain kind of way. The space of likelihood of their trajectory, maybe not their progress, but their trajectory is so weighted that something might occur in this area.

Blaise Agüera y Arcas

Although not technological determinism to be clear, even if we look at the light bulb, there are these interesting things about, for instance, does it have prongs or does it screw in? If it screws in, does it screw in clockwise or counterclockwise? At every moment of combination there are also choices.

Benjamin Bratton

This is what I mean, that there can be many determinisms at the same time, but recognition of the path dependency, which is in a way what automation is all about, is trying to eliminate the contingencies of path dependency. It doesn't mean you get rid of contingency or randomness.

On the simultaneous discovery: there's a couple books out of my favorite series of MIT Press, Vienna's series on theoretical biology, which I happen to think is the most interesting philosophy of technology. There's a whole—convergent evolution, is really the thing that this is known for, which is a topic I'm going to bring up.

But on the question of the inevitable or the evitable, this dynamic path contingency, you've thought quite a lot about it. I wonder if you could also locate your thinking in relationship to what Blaise has posed for us.

Thomas Moynihan

Yeah, yeah. I guess the graph is like a canvas against what I actually find interesting, within which what I find interesting unfolds.

I use the word upper-bound. It's very much, in terms of selecting the data, I have tended to use scientific estimates, and that's why I said extrapolations from physical processes. It's not like I'm including someone in a newspaper in 1870 saying that Jesus is returning tomorrow and the world was going to end. Far be it for me to denigrate that. I'm more interested in the scientific view, which is like an upper-bound. It's like a canvas within which the future could possibly unfold.

As you know, current science tells us that the Earth may remain habitable for something on the order of a billion to 1.5 billion years, given the expansion of the sun and the eventual ramifications that it has on our atmosphere, but that's an upper-bound, and within that, there's a whole range of contingency.

It's like all of the ways in which everything could play out are unimaginably large, that's why I find it interesting.

I think, again, a very strong thread that brings everything that, particularly in the planetary sapience aspect what of Antikythera does together is almost finding analogies for what—say we are creating a planetary intelligence or something of that sort—finding analogies between what that type of intelligence is and the type of intelligence we are.

I’ve drawn this biography metaphor. Like I said, we know the bookends of our biography. We all know that we will, on average, live x number of years, but again, that provides the canvas within which we conduct ourselves, and I think that's an important orienting thing. That's where contingency unfolds.

I care about not getting run over because I know that hopefully I can live for a further few decades. I think that's how we need to extend that type of thinking to the planetary.

The final point is that that's the condition of responsibility, right? You know, we think of ourselves, and that's what I keep thinking of as a bildungsroman, right? It's this kind of narrative form where a person kind of narrates to themselves their life as a way of acknowledging that they were an agent that created it, so therefore they can kind of write the future of their life.

I'm interested in this idea of what does that mean at the planetary scale? That means really coming to terms with part dependency in these contingencies, and the composition of this.

Benjamin Bratton

I have a question. I wanted to put on this relationship of design and contingency, and what's at stake for this as a question, but I do want to turn to Stephanie on this around the automation and ask you to expand a little bit on something you said rather quickly, referencing Fuller, which is that complex ecological systems are already a kind of automation, and that the forms that we are making are sort of an artificialization of this.

But I wanted to expand on that a little bit further. Also the way in which you talk about automation itself as a kind of distributed intelligence. Please.

Stephanie Sherman

A couple stories to bring these two ideas together.

I think in Fuller's case, he's really talking about embedding, right? There's a series of processes that get formalized into protocols and they get embedded in that embedding or encoding, as we might think about it, is kind of then a perpetual process.

I'm thinking about this in terms of how time gets internalized actually, that there's kind of an absorption of time into the process, where then it actually doesn't need to be calculated any more at any level because the calculation is like embedded or encoded, doesn't need to be a conscientious calculation, it's immersed. A few things that I wanted to pull on from that question. The Fordist assembly line comes around because Ford has the capacity to make the machines that make the components, so there's enough capacity to actually standardize all those components that allows that production to actually flow in one continuous process.

The other thing that about time that I was thinking about is Herbert Simon's Watchmakers Parable, which is about how it's actually not all the sets of individual components that can be infinitely like put together in any which way, but actually the components congeal.

The Watchmakers Parable sets up these two conditions where there's two Watchmakers and each of them gets interrupted in the process of assembling a watch with a phone call, and the question is, why does one Watchmaker achieve assembling the watch much faster than the other Watchmaker does? The one that does assembles all these little parts together, and so when the phone call interrupts the Watchmaker that actually all those little constituent assemblies can just be put together, they don’t have to start from scratch during the interruption.

I think that's actually a really astute way to think about what's happening now in terms of constituent parts, but also the kinds of things we might want to design that actually where like one part within those constituent parts get substituted or interrupted, or what are the forms of interoperability in which the constituent parts might come together in different ways. We don't want to go back to like all the components spread out on the table anymore. We not only can't leave, but that's actually not maybe the right way to move around.

Finally, just one last story about this evolutionary process is that even though on the Fordist assembly line they're experimenting with all these different time dynamics and constituent parts put together, the real story of the assembly line is about a fire. They have to pull everything out of the factory because there's a fire in the plant and when they put it all back together, that's actually the moment that allows the kind of interoperable time dimension to really happen.

I think it's not only that there's like continuous complexity building on complexity, but there's like iterative complexity punctuated by incredible disruption and that those disruptions allow us to then understand complexity in a new way. Maybe that's what we're going through right now.

Benjamin Bratton

I wanted to ask Bobby: you had talked about the composability of the future, which is really what in your landscape architecture program what design—especially in this experimental academic context—is about in experimenting on “how is this composed?”

Now, in your practice, and in this sort of work, the relatively modest-sounding realm of landscape architecture really has to do with designing ecologies, designing ecosystems, and and to Stephanie's point it's not about what you'd traditionally think about in architecture school, designing an object, but rather designing the system that would set in motion the trophic cascades that would eventuate into this object.

I also wanted to speak to this as well, in response to this. One of the things I've seen lately this is over the past couple of years—whenever I visit a lot of design schools—is that there's almost a kind of unspoken presumption that in a way, the world is over and that the best we can do is to sort of remake the ruins in some sort of very modest and apologetic way. To Thomas who spoke about this just seemed like that's the worst thing to be doing, what a horrible time to go to design school.

I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what you see as sort of the large, what is the proper horizon for composability that actually could match the moment of this what is inevitably a kind of artificial future?

Robert Gerard Pietrusko

More or less. Okay, let me get my head in order here.

Let me say a few things about a discipline, which is not what I thought I was gonna be talking about.

Maybe I can show for the, if we're talking about horizons, I can sort of show for the affordances of a discipline that it doesn't quite sort of live up to at the moment.

I didn't study landscape, I studied architecture, I studied signal processing, studied computer music. Just through some weird contingency I ended up— But it suited me.

There's a way that I think exactly as you said, the idea that trying to work with natural systems, modeling natural systems, and simulating how they might unfold in time with all of the uncertainty that that implies is at the core of contemporary landscape pedagogy and landscape thinking.

Yet at the same time, there's a conservative streak in landscape that I think you've properly acknowledged, which is just a mournful modesty that's either retreat from everything or restore everything to some weird moment that was just kind of chosen almost randomly in the 1700s, at least in the US landscape.

I think the way that all of you are talking that this kind of temporal dimension, these multiple paths, the way that units can be combined and result in unexpected emergent properties, that really is, I think, the potential of landscape as a design discipline in a way that I think makes it attractive to folks outside of it. I actually see that there's far more compelling landscape projects being done in fields adjacent to landscape.

Do I get fired now?

I think it has a lot of potential.

Now in terms of specific time horizons, there was actually— I saw a conversation recently, Jim Corner was talking about Freshkills recently. There was a question: did it work? Did it do the thing you're not thinking of? And he's like: “we let topsoil grow.”

That was the project, and then however it evolves over the next 100 years, that is the project that we can only observe. I feel like the sensibility is quite similar. There's a creativity, there's a series of paths that might, that might be pursued in a collective enterprise. And I don't mean collective as in just human but collective as in all of the matter and energy relationships that are entangled in it are gonna determine what that is, and I find that's incredibly powerful. It's an incredibly powerful way to think in design.

Benjamin Bratton

Design more broadly, not just architecture.

One of the things in your definition of intelligence that I wanted to ask you a little bit about—also which I think connects with what Bobby was just saying—is there's the way in which the sentence is written, is that intelligence is something that does something in relationship to other. One—probably incorrect—way to read the sentence would be that in a way, there's a formation of intelligence and agent that then subsequently later on next week enters into these dynamic relations with other agents in one way or anotherб but the way we usually talk about it is much the other way around.

That there are these interactions and things connecting with each other and disconnecting, modeling each other one way or another, that then eventuates in the intelligence of the singular agent. Which actually I think is what you just described in terms of composition. Am I reading it wrong? Or would you like to unpack that? Like how's it gonna stand out?

Blaise Agüera y Arcas

It's both.

Intelligence, and life for that matter, because they both have this kind of recursive quality, they don't exist in isolation. And actually if Sara were with us on the panel today, which I know she originally was slated to be, she would undoubtedly talk about copy number. What she means by copy number is that the idea of something being alive or having been selected for implies there has to be more than one, and ideally there has to be lots for things that exist, they exist because they are the things that exist.

In particular, if they exist and they're non-trivial, then they probably exist more than once because their existence implies a process by which they come into being, and that process is gonna kind of operate over and over. That being the case, all life and all intelligence are inherently social because your environment as a living thing is always other living things. Your environment as an intelligent thing is always other intelligent things.

Intelligence doesn't have to arise in order to survive in a sort of one player game a la Grand Theft Auto where everything around you is an NPC. It arises because you have to model others. And the modeling of others is automatic and it happens even with plants, even with bacteria. It's always social, it's always in relation to other things that are themselves also modeling.

When we talk about this psychologically in humans, the word for it is theory of mind. Although I get into a lot of trouble with linguists, cognitive scientists when I use the term theory of mind for something like a bacterium or a plant. I also get a little bit of trouble with biologists when I use words like symbiosis applied to AI modules or chemicals. But I'm gonna stick to both of those.

A theory of mind is being able to model what is going on in the mind of another. And then you say, well, how do you know that other thing has a mind? You don't, everything has a perspective, but if that other thing is modeling you back, then you also have to have a model of its model of your model and so on. So there's a second order, third order, fourth order, et cetera aspect to all of this. As humans, we can go up to sixth or seventh order normally. There are psychological tests for this: the Sally–Anne test is the common one.

Monkeys probably only have first order, some of the great apes second order. But it's one of the special things that we have developed as humans, the ability to do this higher theory of mind, which is one of the ways that we can organize ourselves into larger constructions like cities.

I've never thought of human intelligence as being an individual human property at all. Individual humans are not that smart. And in fact, if you were to land on Earth as an alien 50,000 years ago, I doubt that you would see humans as being particularly different from a lot of the other megafauna around. It's interesting how not all that much seems to have happened up until the glaciers retreated the last time and for a variety of reasons, things began to really spiral upward socially, and that was driven by theory of mind.

What we think of as human intelligence, we say, oh, the great achievements of human intelligence are Kenneth Clark, whatever. They're not really individual. They're products of us modeling each other and doing division of labor, which involves modeling of others, and thereby creating a super intelligence, which is humanity as a whole. So it is relational, it's bottom up, it's also top down, and the intelligence of the larger thing is not the same thing as the intelligence of the parts.

One place where Sara and I actually differ is that she believes that the Earth as a whole cannot be thought of as alive because its copy number is only one. She says: oh, it'll become alive when they colonize other planets, and the Earth will be alive because it'll be a reproducer. And fair enough.

But my own sense is that any kind of recursive structure like this has always got to have a top, and the Earth is a pretty good place to put the top because we don't know of other things outside the Earth yet that also do modeling of others. Which is it? But it's still certainly something that engages in, that has been constructed by all of the things modeling inside of and interrelating in all of those ways. So for my money, that's good enough to be alive.

Benjamin Bratton

I wanna add a couple things to this and then ask. You said life is intrinsically social. Intelligence is intrinsically social. I think part of that position is that technology is intrinsically social. There is no single technology. It's always existing in relationships with other ones as well, and it's alive as well. That's what I'm gonna ask you.

One thing we haven't talked too much about is AI. As much as you think AI exists. I'm sorry, AI is alive, or at least AI is life. Both life and intelligence. I have persistent existence on the mind. It is both life and intelligence. And when you show us the abiogenesis simulations, you don't think, they're not simulations? This is not a simulation of symbiogenesis. This is symbiogenesis. So, please unpack for us. Why do you say AI is alive or life? What was the difference between them?

Blaise Agüera y Arcas

Okay, so first of all, on the simulation. Yeah, and I was question of reality or not reality. There's a big controversy here. So, our friend Christof Koch sometimes complained that computers can't be intelligent because they don't exist in the real world. If you have a hydrodynamic simulation on a computer, it's not wet. Look at the silicon, it's not wet. It's a different thing to simulate fluid dynamics versus to be wet. I get what he means except that if you have something else in that simulation that is a part of it, then it is wet, according to the terms of that simulation.

I don't know whether there are outer universes that we're a part of and this is all happening in a simulation as well. There are people who believe that. I don't think it's an absurd belief, but whether that is the case or not, you have to think about interactions happening within an environment, within a game board as it were, and whatever is happening on that game board is real on that game board.

If we want to define life in functional terms, as opposed to in terms that either invoke soul or something supernatural, or that invoke something that is so specific to the way life is built here, that it really is completely anthropocentric, then I think you have to do it in functional terms, which is the way Turing talked about it. When you talk in functional terms, that brings along with it platform independence or multiple realizability, meaning that you're no longer necessarily talking about the nature of the things that are implementing that. You're talking about the thing itself.

If, for instance, I come from the future and I show you an object and I tell you, you know, look at this cool thing, you're like, what the hell was that? I just see a piece of metal with some ports and some carbon nanotubes on the inside. And I say, no, it's an artificial kidney. And if you implant it in a body, then it will have a hundred year operating lifetime. That's amazing. Well, its kidney-ness is not imminent in the atoms in any way. It could be implemented with all kinds of different technologies. What matters is that if you put it in a body, then in relationship with the other parts of the body, it will do the job of a kidney. That's why it's a kidney. It's a functional statement. It's not a materialist statement. And it's not a kidney until it's in the body.

Benjamin Bratton

One of the other things that Stephanie—and I wanted to just open it up, please jump in on any other questions you wanna ask each other before we move to the Q&A—was the shift between… One of the ways in which we often think about automation in terms of the replacement dynamic is a kind of biomorphism, where there's a certain something that has occurred in a natural environment, and then there's a lower resolution technical approximation of it, which the assembly line, the rainforest and the assembly line. You also talked about a way in which—perhaps a converse of this—in which humans or other life forms become organized into the machinic automation system, where instead of the biomorphism it goes the other direction, it's a kind of techno-morphism, in which biology comes to organize itself in relationship to the way the technical system would work, which would seem to me to have a lot of implications for what you're saying as well, but if you wanna talk maybe a little bit about that.

Stephanie Sherman

Sure, like birds imitating car alarms or something? Yeah, I mean it goes both directions, right?

I mean this is not a one-way path where I think it's like nature and then artificialization, but it's very much this mutual dynamic, and that's why it looks interesting. If we look at the assembly line, there's many, many wonderful critiques of the kind of ways that human beings in their fullest extent were reduced through that process to kind of mechanization, but actually the learning to implement the physicalized AI was that humans were pretending to be something that they were not. And by performing that, that's how we learn, how to actually construct such a thing is by performing and creating that. The converse, maybe just to speak to the physicalized AI question: this is where the dynamic between something like Waymo, which is very protectionist and very concerned about not hitting anything, and Tesla, which is a little bit more renegade, which has a whole distributed network that's actually learning by being out in the environment and feeding that back into the system that it's actually much more like babies bumping into things or making small mistakes that then update the system and inform that half-centralized, half-distributed intelligence dynamic that is this dispersion.

Benjamin Bratton

Yeah, so landscape is oftentimes, we've talked about this, is the conservative history of this kind of putting green on things, a kind of gardening, you know? But what we're talking about here is an emergence of a kind of convergent evolution in which there is an appearance of forms of machine intelligence, computation, with different levels and abstractions of computation that is also a landscape-scale phenomenon that is in the wild, so to speak, in way or another. I think that you see where I'm going with this.

Robert Gerard Pietrushko

There's a side of this too, I guess, because we've been talking about these questions of de-skilled labor as part of this, and the kidney example. It's a little bit like the case study I presented today, three plus minutes. There's a couple sides of it that relate to this, the idea too that the interpreters set it quickly as being kind of de-skilled or without expertise, but it's precisely that there's an institutional or organizational apparatus that is using them as sensors in which their particular consciousness is not all that important. They're reflecting on sensation and only through a disciplined set of yes / no questions are they then told by the apparatus what it was that they actually perceived and how to name it and how to classify it. I think that it goes back to some of the comments, Benjamin, that you were saying the other night during the keynote too, that that relationship, it's not just that we're modeling human intelligence in a fast way, but it's the tools themselves reflect back on what it is to know particularly, and it's actually shaping, and I feel like it's embedded in some of these early materials as well.

In terms of the larger understanding of how processes like this affect our understanding of the natural world, again, just limited to the small case studies that I presented just to keep it coherent. The folks involved in some of these, their work was stripped of the context, but then published in the main journals of ecology at the time, but what you have then is knowledge of the natural landscape is filtered through this process, and they're only talking about communities of plants or associations of plants that produce scale from an aerial altitude. Suddenly, that point of view, the desire to see things from that altitude at that extent shapes what the discipline understands about the landscapes that are being described, meaning that there's all sorts of things that get redacted because they're too small to produce scale. I feel like that sort of recursion of a particular process of kind of disciplined vision filtered through an algorithmic procedure of sense-making connected to technologies of sensing, then go back and through academic channels, shape what the sciences actually know about those landscapes is a fascinating, I think, little nugget or case study. It's a template of, I think, a number of the things that have been discussed.

Benjamin Bratton

It actually very much connects with what I was going to ask Thomas, also make this the last lob, unless anyone else please join us, and then we'll have a couple questions and then we'll continue the conversation.

This has to do with that relationship, that role between, let's say, technology and science and the things that are… what you've talked about is, I mean, not technological determinism, as you mentioned, it's the ways in which the possibility of, not only the kinds of questions that are asked, but that the basis of epistemology itself is something that's inseparable from the instrumentation through which we think, whether or not the machine itself is capable of thinking and it's in all the novel and new ways that it now is this dynamic, the convergent intelligence, so the sociality of life and the sociality of intelligence and the sociality of technology were never separate from each other. They were always intermingled, right? What we may see today as amazing cyborgization and hybridizations actually always has been. I wonder if you could put this in a little bit of historical context, like the timeline you draw of these moments of discovery or realization or around this as well, or also ones as Blaise described, like they were very much essentially not predetermined, but there was a contingency or an inevitability by which someone would do this, but they were all mediated by a particular moment in the evolution of technology that made the epistemology possible in the first place. I wonder if you could like close us out with a discussion with that.

Thomas Moynihan

Yeah, absolutely, that's a great question. I mean, the graph is obviously very hard to see, so that's why Lisa Strausfeld is gonna help me and make it something that can actually be read. But there are moments in there where you can see step changes and they are all primarily based on scientific discovery, which is based on technical evolution. So, there's a big one where Curie discovers radium and suddenly people like, oh, the sun isn't just collapsing on itself and producing heat via friction, which creates a future, but on Earth with like a few million years, suddenly people like, oh, atoms release energy and the future just [expanded]. And so that's a good example of a technology creating scientific discovery, creating this transformation in our sense of ourselves.

A further point I want to make is just on the broader historical context. What I see Blaise's work and Sara's work to the degree that they agree as doing and what I think is really fundamental is actually showing us what Darwin told us, and it's because we now have these technological apparatus. Now we can recreate his warm little pond in a computer. I see some truly groundbreaking things that are being done here as showing us what was so obvious and we just didn't see it before. And one of those is what Darwin did and he didn't know it himself, but in the sense of Copernicus and Kepler, it was centuries until people started talking about the Copernican Revolution. There's a similar thing required with Darwin. What did he show us? I'm getting to the final point. He disconfirmed the alternate hypothesis that was still very much alive up until that point that incredibly complicated things could just pop into existence. He showed that we were born from time and from lots of it.

It's an example that I like to use, which I'm sure some of you are familiar with, is literally just a couple of decades before Origin. There's a very famous German biologist, Lorenz Oken, who seriously, genuinely, sincerely thought that the first humans emerged from sea slime, and he worried himself thinking about how this first generation had fed for themselves because there were no parents. He took this—you know, again, we laugh, but it's, before Darwin, this was a live, viable alternate hypothesis. Here we are now, a century and a half later, right? Is it something like that? A century and a half later, and through your work and through Sara's work, we're really realizing what Darwin told us is that we were born of time, not slime.

Benjamin Bratton

We are absolutely ending with that. Thank you.

Let me just say thanks very much to our panelists here today. We have a little bit of time for Q&A and while we're getting the microphones ready and you're thinking about what you may want to ask in relationship to this discussion, I also want to extend my sincere thanks once again to the whole Antikythera team, to Haley in particular for helping put this all of this together, to our amazing film crew, Morningside Media Lab, so many—speaking of scaffolds—so many people and the designers, so many people, hello Andrey wherever you are, who helped design a lot of what you're looking at right here, so my sincere thanks to all of you for helping us get this. So with that, let's have a couple thoughts.

Yeah, Andrea.

Andrea Capra

Lately anthropocentrism has been getting some bad press, but I would actually like to make the case that Antikythera as a whole is quite anthropocentric and this needs not to be a bad thing. To me the question of overcoming anthropocentrism, it's something that always struck me as almost a category error, right? It's almost as if I could step out of my frame of reference. Right? The question not only begs some logical inconsistencies, but also some ethical issues, such as, do I really want to step out of my frame of reference as a human? The answer in my case is no, I think Tom would also agree with me to some extent. So perhaps I wonder if we are now in need of a better nomenclature for the negative elements of anthropocentrism that in various ways, our panelists seem to be critiquing. To me, perhaps, more than thinking of anthropocentrism as a bad thing, one should think of anthropomaximalism as a bad thing. Anthropocentrism can indeed be understood also as a way of promoting human coexistence with this surrounding world, the umwelt, and so on and so forth. There's a deep tradition of that that starts with, well, humanism, so it predates Cartesian separations between mind and matter, and so on and so forth. The very idea of planetary sapience, to me, seems to be underpinned by a link between the two, which is the anthropos, right? Also as a catalyst of the emergence of sapience on a planetary level. I was wondering if the panelists could address the fact that perhaps anthropocentrism needs not to be a bad thing, and we're maybe in need of a different word to kind of encapsulate the negative elements of anthropocentrism that we seem to be all addressing, and my proposal here would be the idea of anthropomaximalism.

Benjamin Bratton

I have my own thoughts on this, but I really would like to hear what… This is something sort of your ballpark, but does anyone else want to take a question on this as well?

Stephanie Sherman

I can start. I guess I always thought about anthropocentrism as a problem of centering the human as the thing around which everything else orbits, right? It's like an orbital problem and a focus problem. I think part of the argument of sapience is that humans are one conduit through which intelligence is achieved, and an important one, but also that there's one that will exceed us. And we're not, maybe Tom's argument, we're not the end of that evolutionary process. Seeing ourselves as part of this, not as the center of it, is maybe the shift. It's not like we want to get rid of anthropos. We're currently very instrumental to it, but we can also imagine a world in which we are not central. Some of the greatest AI paradoxes speak to this in ways that are also ridiculous because they don't account for the ways in which we actually have played a role in this and might play a role to come if we don't keep fucking it up so badly.

Blaise Agüera y Arcas

I agree with everything Stephanie just said, and I would say the project here is not one just of de-centering ourselves or trying to not take our own perspective. We'll always have—there is no view from nowhere—we'll always have a perspective that comes from what we understand and can see in our umwelt. But it's also important to have some imagination and to not imagine that you are at the top of a great chain of being, or in an org chart with God at the top and then people and then the animals and plants and so on, so not taking such an oriented view but thinking more in terms of networks and also understanding codependency and mutual dependency. I would refer you to Robin Wall Kimmerer and Braiding Sweetgrass and her more recent book in which she talks about the way a lot of, and it's not unique to American indigenous cultures, many cultures that are more conscious of the contingency of their livelihoods on other organisms take more seriously the idea of putting yourself in the place of other species, instances of other species, other organisms to try and understand what the shapes of all those relationships are in order to take better care. For me, that's kind of at the heart of what it's all about, recognizing that we're all interdependent and using that awareness to foster something that looks more like a great web of life as opposed to imagining ourselves to be insulated from it, or above it, or something.

Benjamin Bratton

We can talk a little bit about this, I know, I think, where you're going with this and should we say, as Thomas mentioned, humans are in essence the conduit of a society in a certain form of emergent planetary intelligence. We are the one who's asking the question: when is “now?” Which is certainly why I find a little bit less patience with some forms of post-humanist theory that recognize that mind-body dualism is wrong, the humans are a species that were entangled with all these kinds of things as well, but it ends up having a leveling effect, which, oh, well, there's cognition everywhere, therefore all cognition is the same. Right, and it's a kind of becoming vegetal, a kind of will towards a certain kind of mindlessness in a certain way as well. That's clearly not what we're on about, but you had a, I didn't mean to step away.

Thomas Moynihan

Yeah, so, of course, anthropocentricism becomes in many forms and the one that Blaise gestures to, your point about Gould was well received earlier, but I'm a massive fan and I would say above anyone else, he's done more than anyone else to take apart that idea that we are the inevitable end of the great change of being. We're just purely contingent things. To riff on the patron saint of Antikythera Stanisław Lem, he said that we are the fluke products of the roulette wheels that are galaxies, which I think sums that up. We're completely contingent.

But to put another point on that: in a sense, we are currently like the protagonist of planetary history, but there's no reason to think that that's gonna continue. I've been thinking about this recently in terms of this, but there's also no reason to advocate this at this point. Yes, we might as well just let go of the steering wheel. Yes, but there's also no reason to think that our current idea of what human agency is, and I know you weren't saying this, but is the be all and end?

I've been thinking about this recently in terms of the mitochondria. We were talking about this a bit yesterday, the ancestors used to be bacteria that were freely moving and could be produced by themselves. Now they immediately occupy most of our cells and provide the energy that makes us do our things. If we are to become, if we're talking about planetary intelligence, we as individuals are in some sense the mitochondria. Do we sacrifice our autonomy? We probably will have to in order to create that wider and larger coordination. On the one hand, I am a human, I don't want that to happen, but then on the other hand, I benefit from all the mitochondria. So yeah, the centrism, it's like there is no center.

Blaise Agüera y Arcas

But there's no center, your mitochondria also benefit from being in you. The trouble that I have with that—and I think it speaks to what you were saying as well—is that there's not just, there is nestedness to this of course, mitochondria inside, you know, our eukaryote cells which are inside us, but the idea that we equal something separate from ourselves in our mitochondria, and that we are the boss somehow of that, it's not right. All these things are composed.

Even when we talk about human intelligence, we say we have the steering wheel, like what is this that we're talking about even? It's not your brain, my brain, you know, it's a collective thing that is already, something that we have ceased to understand, right?

Benjamin Bratton

I understand, my real point was like this agency misidentified as anthropogenic agency, because of course it's a complex of different things that came together with these mutual compulsions and dependencies or something like that. But I was speaking to you a little bit against this, sort of the ethos with posthumanism, like the proper response to the recognition of anthropogenic climate change is to try to subtract all possible anthropogenic agency as possible, like essentially just sort of pull back in and then it's agency itself that is the problem. Unhelpful. And this is to me like the worst way to deal with a house on fire. That's all I can say, okay.

Perhaps we have another excellent question that will provoke equally interesting. We do.

Audience Member 3

Hi, thank you all so much. It's been such a pleasure hearing you all speak today. I'm really nervous to ask this question because perhaps it's somewhat of a dumb question. It's a question concerning technology. I'm curious, technology seems to have its root etymologically in technique, this idea of art skill or craft, this logic of art skill or craft. And I'm curious, maybe this question is directed at Benjamin, but any of the other panelists. If intelligence is this massively distributed phenomenon that can emerge in bacteria, can emerge in machines, is technology also a phenomenon that can emerge through different species, both alive or not alive? I'm curious if any of you can expand on this and how can we define technology in the context of everything that we've all been speaking about here to today?

Benjamin Bratton

This is an excellent question. And I'm always happy to sort of re-answer the question that Heidegger asked and got wrong about the question concerning technology. I think there's a longer, more technical answer to give about the ways that we want to define the specificity of technology, the ways in which a system uses some part extrinsic to itself in order to allopoetically recompose the environment in the surface of its capture of energy information and matter. But that definition, I think, while true, implies also, again, a little bit of a Vitruvian idea of technology as like, there is this self-encapsulated agent that then goes and grabs a tool that goes and does something with and that this tool has a temporary function. Well, this is all the case, but it is the sociality of technology as we're discussing here and in the ways in which it's always already been part of the process by which biology evolves, by which intelligence evolves in this way as well. So in that sense, it's not only there are ways in which it's social with us, but we are social with the result of our anatomy. Our opposable thumbs are the result of ancestors being essentially transformed by the technologies in which they come into process as much as it is the other way around.

I think part of the question, and one of the which we'll try to explore further with the studio that we'll do here at MIT in the summer, the both the physical and paradigmatic convergence between these ideas of life and intelligent technologies is that these categories may not only are perforating, they may in fact be collapsing to a certain degree. Many of the kinds of things that we may point at and call that's a technology, like AI, may already have exploded the boundaries of that and what constitutes a technology in the first place. So in that sense, there's the techne, the techniques of this, this is actually not, I think, the right way to talk about it. Technology may be the wrong word for technology because it implies essentially a kind of craft and tool that is about making that in a way extension is, and how Heidegger alienated us from being, and I think for us, clearly it's what also closes our reality to us. But I wonder if anyone else has thoughts on that.

Thomas Moynihan

Very briefly if I may. Yeah, very briefly, I promise. That's a fantastic question. It really is. All I would say is that ants invented agriculture and undertaking like 70 million years ago.

Benjamin Bratton

Yeah, exactly. And agriculture invented ants.

Stephanie Sherman

My partner's an economist, which is Blaise's favorite species. They talk about it in economic studies, especially people who study the theory of technology and history of technology. It's really technology as a process, not a thing. I think part of what we've been talking about is actually technology as an organizational process and you can follow this through Beer’s and cybernetics and that kind of thing, but it really extends, I think, across a lot of the arguments we've been making.

Blaise Agüera y Arcas

Quick note, aside from the ants farming funguses or chimps using sticks to fish ants and so on, there are obviously other species in other places on the planet where living things have technologies, which generally is interpreted to mean that technology is nonliving, which already poses some really great challenges. Is the snail's shell nonliving? Things get complicated. Bones, exactly. But what I think has been unique to things that we call human technology—that's not the case, more or less, for any other of these technologies of other species on Earth—is that we have theories behind them. We can really think through how a bunch of things would compose without just trying it all and seeing what works and having what whatever works sticks. It's both cultural accumulation and theory. That is something that AI is poised to do now, which has only been done by humans, which is a pretty big shift.

Benjamin Bratton

And theories from the process of the artificialization of intelligence is in fact disclosing what intelligence is in ways that wouldn't have been otherwise.

Audience Member 4

Yeah, I'm gonna jump in. I wanted to come back to this question of imagination that Blaise, you brought up, within the context of… Benjamin, you just identified this and other people on the panel as well, with life as a form of autocorrect. When it comes to imagining potential futures, alternative futures, future trajectories, is imagination a form of autocorrect? Kind of underlying this question is also this: what is the place of imagination in how we define intelligence, how we define life, and also conceptions of the now?

Benjamin Bratton

I think it was autocomplete, but autocorrect is good.

Blaise Agüera y Arcas

Autocorrect implies that there's a correct, which I don't believe.

Benjamin Bratton

I mean, your definition of intelligence and the capacity to model and predict future is not the future, but a future. Like the thing that's gonna come next, like the train will arrive at 705, but multiple counterfactual contingent futures that are imaginary until they're not.

Blaise Agüera y Arcas

The more things you have that you can compose the more space there is for imagination, which is why our imagination has become richer as we develop deeper and deeper culture. There's more Lego pieces to play with and to compose in new ways. I think that the idea that imagination is complete novelty is wrong in the sense that it always uses things that are there, but it composes them in new ways.

Audience Member 5

Thanks, I want to come back to something that Benjamin raised, which is the question of the future. In listening to all of this, and in fact, building on the last point about imaginations of the future, I do feel like we are one of the first generations that have seen many very apparent ways in which our future could come to a very rapid end very quickly. So I wondered: as we think about intelligence going beyond humanity out to a global scale, who becomes the agent that takes care of our future? And what are our responsibilities as our tiny pieces of that to make sure that that's moving in the right direction, not just beyond us?

Benjamin Bratton

One of the things that I was taken by the work that you've done on this, is that there is a timeline of a transformation in how much past there is and how much future there is that track each other very closely through time. Like as we discover more past, we imagine more future, that it's growing. Like as you move into the future, the amount of future that is possible to imagine is getting larger. But I think to a point, this reaches a moment where, 1953, the definitive date of the Earth is figured out, we consider it marked as. It's also the exact same moment when the precarity of whether there will be a future at all kind of emerges. The idea of the possible future gets bigger and exactly the moment it may go to zero is kind of the paradox at the moment.

I would speak to the agency questions less about who than what, rather than like a single governor or a single figure that does this, but rather the forms of agency that can be configured in the sort of composed and the trophic cascades that will over the long term give rise to the outcomes that we may never get to see ourselves.

Blaise Agüera y Arcas

The most optimistic thing that I've seen written about this was in James Lovelock's last book, which wrote at age 100, Novacene. He wrote Gaia will keep the peace, and I that includes AI for him. It includes AI for him. I certainly don't think that, well, that means we can all just chill out, right? On the contrary, to the degree that Gaia is intelligent, it's intelligent because we are all intelligent, and the times that we've been saved since 1953 from nuclear annihilation, it's actually all been because of the actions of individual people who decide not to push the button, when in some cases automated systems told them to do so. All of those were acts of mutual care, done by actors who happen to find themselves in a pivot in history. It's a little scary to think about us pulling the trigger on that Russian roulette device too often. I do worry about the increasing potentials that we have for all of that. On the other hand, our mutual care, despite all of the dark things that we hear about, is also growing in a lot of ways. So I don't know, I have my good days and bad days about all of this.

Benjamin Bratton

Once again, ending on hope, is always a good place, and on Lovelock as well. Thank you again, all of you for coming and joining us over the course of the last two days. We will see you at the reception on site where we can continue the conversation. Also, once again, we'll be back. That is in the early, in the summer of 2025 to do our Antikythera Studio here at MIT. This may be an opportunity to collaborate more directly with some of you, I certainly hope so. Thank you so much.