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Antikythera at MIT introduces Antikythera’s work on the philosophy of planetary computation to the Cambridge community through a series of events at the MIT Media Lab (October 23 and 25).
Antikythera is a philosophy of technology think tank based at the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles, with satellite offices in Beijing and Venice.
This event is presented in collaboration with Antikythera, MIT Architecture, and The MIT Press.
Launching fully in Spring 2025 and building off of the unrequited legacy of the Journal of Art & Science, the Antikythera digital journal will bring cutting edge interactive, browser-based design, generative AI, and integrated media to the philosophy of planetary computation. Join Antikythera Director Benjamin Bratton, Design Director Nicolay Boyadjiev, and MIT Press Director Amy Brand and speakers for drinks and hors d'oeuvres after the symposium to connect with the thinkers shaping this new school of thought.
A Keynote Lecture by Benjamin Bratton
Wednesday, October 23, 6:00pm, Doors: 5:30
As computation becomes planetary infrastructure, how does its acceleration of hybrid intelligences pose new challenges to fundamental philosophical questions? As machine sensing, machine cognition, machine embodiment co-evolve, how does computation become more than a mere technology, but the medium through which we ask existential questions about who, what and how we are?
Benjamin Bratton’s keynote lecture features Antikythera’s philosophy of technology and shares speculative design projects from the think tank. Through studios, publications, and an ever-expanding network, Antikythera is building a new school of thought that integrates work from computer science, astrobiology, intellectual history, science-fiction, architecture, automation theory, and more. The keynote reviews the core research themes of the program: planetary computation, synthetic intelligence, recursive simulations, hemispherical stacks, and planetary sapience and presents glimpses of the content and ideas behind Antikythera’s forthcoming digital journal with MIT Press.
The Antikythera mechanism, sometimes called the “first computer,” was more than a calculator; it was also an astronomical device. The birth of computation is in the orientation of intelligence in relation to its planetary condition. From Climate Science to Synthetic Biology, this remains the case.
As computation evolves into planetary infrastructure–scientific, cultural, geopolitical–perhaps its most decisive impact will be not in what it does as a tool, but as an epistemological technology: what it discloses to sapient intelligence about how the world works. This in turn alters how intelligence remakes its worlds, including the ongoing artificialization of intelligence, life, sensation, and ecosystems.
What is the philosophical school of thought most appropriate to this reality? There are moments in history when ideas of what may be possible are ahead of what is technically feasible, but there are other moments when technological affordances outpace our language to orient them.
Perhaps instead of only projecting timeless wisdom, the work of speculative philosophy is to compose new interpretations of new realities, and to do so through direct exploratory encounters with the technologies that disclose those realities to us. Ultimately, we may ask, what is planetary computation for, and toward what futures might it be oriented and in turn orient the future of complex life and intelligence?
Friday October 25, 11-6pm, Doors: 10:30
A symposium on computational technologies and the evolution of planetary intelligence previewing Antikythera’s forthcoming collaboration with MIT Press
Planetary Sapience, one of Antikythera’s core research themes, asks not only what planetary computation can do, but also, with great optimism, what it is for?
Planetary sapience is defined as the long and arguably accelerating evolutionary process by which the Earth folds itself into myriad intelligent forms –biological and now also mineral– through which it comes to grasp essential and even existential realities about itself, from its own age to its climatic metabolisms and processes. Humanity is an expression of planetary sapience but not its sole medium.
That evolution has been fraught in ways we are only now coming to terms with. Sapience evolved through the violent evolutionary history of human biological and technological intelligence. The paradoxes are severe. Today planetary sapience, ‘'wakes up' at a moment it comes to realize that the consequences of its own emergence (such as anthropogenic climate change) are what puts its own continuance in jeopardy. Complex abstract technological intelligence grasps its own evolution but wakes up in a house of fire, burning largely because of its awakening and enlightenment.
How must it reorient itself so that its long term viability is more ensured? What is the role of planetary computation in diagnosing, modeling and addressing those futures?
In our lifetimes, computational technologies have been the primary means by which planetary sapience conceives of and instrumentalizes itself. It has become both the medium through which complex intelligence thinks and how it acts.
For a speculative philosophy of technology, this suggests that the purpose of planetary computation may reside as much in what it discloses to intelligence to itself, including through the artificialization of intelligence, than in what it does as a mere tool, albeit one with earth-shaking significance.
Planetary Sapience assembles many of Antikythera’s inaugural journal contributors to discuss the themes of planetary intelligence. The symposium will preview many of the exciting contributions launching officially in Spring 2025.
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