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?

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? 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?

Below philosopher of technology and directer of the innovative Antikythera think tank Benjamin Bratton explores “accidental megastructures”, “planetary scale computation”, and A.I futures. He is Professor of Visual Arts at University of California, San Diego.

See below an earlier version of that presentation tilted “A Philosophy of Planetary Computation,” Bratton delivered to The Long Now Foundation on January 29, 2025 at the Cowell Theater in San Francisco.

The blurb: “In his Long Now Talk, Bratton takes us on a whirlwind philosophical journey into the concept of Planetary Computation — a journey that began in classical Greece with the story of the Antikythera mechanism, the analog computer that gave his think-tank its name. But his inquiry stretches far beyond antiquity — back to the very origins of biological life itself and forward to a present and future where we must increasingly grapple with artificial life and intelligence.”