Benjamin Bratton

“The Earth has very recently evolved a smart exoskeleton,” posits Benjamin Bratton in an essay about what he terms “planetary sapience.” The existence of this exoskeleton — an orbiting web of satellites monitoring and internetworking every corner of this planet, a weave of undersea and underground cables transmitting data across continents at two-thirds the speed of light, and an uncountable mass of computing devices communicating across those networks — is indisputable. The more pressing question, however, is what we ought to do with it.

Benjamin Bratton begins his Long Now Talk by noting the “persistent weirdness” of our times. We find ourselves in a “pre-paradigmatic moment” in which our technology has outpaced our theories of what to do with it. 

The task of philosophy today is to catch up.

Such is the focus of Antikythera, the philosophy of technology think-tank, incubated by the Berggruen Institute, where Bratton serves as Director. Through interdisciplinary studios, lectures, salons, and publications, Antikythera maps the frontiers of what Bratton terms planetary computation: computation not as a purely human endeavor but as something our planet does to itself — a tool for both understanding and shaping the Earth. 

In this moment of both promise and peril, what is planetary computation for? How might it be oriented from first principles?

To answer these questions, Bratton takes us on a whirlwind philosophical 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. 

In Bratton’s telling, all these points on the historical continuum are interlinked, composing a scaffolding where advances in biological and technological complexity feed back into each other. The planetary is both the stage and the actor upon which this long chain of evolution has played out — rearranging itself to produce thinking creatures that then rearrange the planet to create thinking machines. “The fire apes,” Bratton said, “figured out how to make the rocks think. It's then part of not only our evolutionary trajectory, but also part of the evolutionary trajectory of the rocks.” 

The key to Bratton’s work is the concept of the planetary — distinct from the “international,” “global,” or “worldwide.” In his context, the planetary refers not just to the scope or scale of our intelligence and capacity to effect change, but to a deeper root. He sees human culture itself as an “emergent phenomenon of an ancient and deep biogeochemical flux” — not merely resident to the Earth but an outcropping from it. Our planet has evolved us, and we have in turn evolved a stack of technologies that can help us understand and govern that very same planet that produced us.  

Bratton highlights the work of a number of his colleagues at Antikythera exploring the intertwined notions of life, intelligence, and technology, including Google Researcher Blaise Agüera y Arcas and astrobiologist and upcoming Long Now Talks speaker Sara Imari Walker. 

How might complex planetary intelligence thrive over the long now? The preconditions for long-term adaptiveness, Bratton argues, will need to be artificially realized, and we won’t be able to control what happens as a result of bringing them into existence. This, Bratton says, is the Copernican trauma of our time.

In concluding his remarks, Bratton turns to James Lovelock, the pioneering environmental scientist who first proposed the Gaia Hypothesis. Referencing Lovelock’s final book, Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence (02019), Bratton notes that for both Lovelock and himself the potential coming of post-human intelligence was not cause for “grief.” Instead, the frame of the planetary makes it so that finding ourselves in a grander story where “the evolution of intelligence does not peak with one terraforming species of nomadic primates,” is, to Bratton,  “the happiest news possible.”

Where to go next

• Read Bratton’s introduction to Antikythera and what it means to develop a “new speculative philosophy of computation.”
• In collaboration with MIT Press, Antikythera is launching a new journal, with the first issue expected in Spring 02025.
• In conversation with Nils Gilman in Noema, Bratton discusses how Antikythera’s work is tied to the “futures before us that must be conceived and built.”
• In an essay in Noema, Bratton explores Planetary Sapience further, placing it in the setting of a historical moment that “feels long but may be fleeting.”
• Watch Bratton’s 02023 talk on Synthetic Intelligence in the context of the planetary model of computation.
• The idea of the planetary has many roots, but one key moment in its history was the release of the first photos of the Earth from space. The outward flowering of culture and philosophy inspired by those photos in the late 01960s — from the dawn of the environmental movement to the publication of the Whole Earth Catalog to Martin Heidegger’s reaction of shock and uprooting — reflects a point of inflection for our capacity as a species to think about the big here and the long now.