Accept All Cookies

Accept All Cookies by Benjamin Bratton is a collection of key concepts in the philosophy of planetary computation, evolution, and intelligence. This book features pointed provocations on synthetic intelligence, artificial computation, recursive simulations, the geopolitics of stack systems, and the paradoxical relationships between planetary intelligence and transformation. The 100+ concise catalysts for deliberation are drawn from the ideas and research that has emerged from Antikythera’s programs.

What Is Life?

What life is, and how its essence can be understood as computation that grows more complex over time in symbiotic relationships.

In 1944, quantum mechanics pioneer Erwin Schrödinger wrote a slim but influential volume, What Is Life?, posing the primary question that rendered biology so mysterious to a physicist. How can life and all its attendant complexities come to exist in a random universe, governed by simple laws, whose disorder only increases over time?

The Noocene

The Noocene features selections from Antikythera’s archive presented as a generative cinematic matrix overlaid with key concepts from the school of thought.

What is Intelligence?

It has come as a shock to some AI researchers that a large neural net that predicts next words seems to produce a system with general intelligence. Yet this is consistent with a long-held view among some neuroscientists that the brain evolved precisely to predict the future—the “predictive brain” hypothesis. In What Is Intelligence?, Blaise Agüera y Arcas takes up this idea—that prediction is fundamental not only to intelligence and the brain but to life itself—and explores the wide-ranging implications.

Auto: fordian parables of platform automation

Automation is an evolutionary process of embedding decisions through planetary platforms, generating dependencies and contingencies that are anything but autonomous.

Hemispherical Stacks

Hemispherical Stacks introduces a genre of scenario fictions, which sits at the intersection of future studies, systems thinking, and narrative art.

Accept All Cookies

Accept All Cookies by Benjamin Bratton is a collection of key concepts in the philosophy of planetary computation, evolution, and intelligence. This book features pointed provocations on synthetic intelligence, artificial computation, recursive simulations, the geopolitics of stack systems, and the paradoxical relationships between planetary intelligence and transformation. The 100+ concise catalysts for deliberation are drawn from the ideas and research that has emerged from Antikythera’s programs.

What is Intelligence?

It has come as a shock to some AI researchers that a large neural net that predicts next words seems to produce a system with general intelligence. Yet this is consistent with a long-held view among some neuroscientists that the brain evolved precisely to predict the future—the “predictive brain” hypothesis. In What Is Intelligence?, Blaise Agüera y Arcas takes up this idea—that prediction is fundamental not only to intelligence and the brain but to life itself—and explores the wide-ranging implications.

What Is Life?

What life is, and how its essence can be understood as computation that grows more complex over time in symbiotic relationships.

In 1944, quantum mechanics pioneer Erwin Schrödinger wrote a slim but influential volume, What Is Life?, posing the primary question that rendered biology so mysterious to a physicist. How can life and all its attendant complexities come to exist in a random universe, governed by simple laws, whose disorder only increases over time?

Auto: fordian parables of platform automation

Automation is an evolutionary process of embedding decisions through planetary platforms, generating dependencies and contingencies that are anything but autonomous.

The Noocene

The Noocene features selections from Antikythera’s archive presented as a generative cinematic matrix overlaid with key concepts from the school of thought.

Hemispherical Stacks

Hemispherical Stacks introduces a genre of scenario fictions, which sits at the intersection of future studies, systems thinking, and narrative art.

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty

What has planetary-scale computation done to our geopolitical realities? It takes different forms at different scales—from energy and mineral sourcing and subterranean cloud infrastructure to urban software and massive universal addressing systems; from interfaces drawn by the augmentation of the hand and eye to users identified by self-quantification and the arrival of legions of sensors, algorithms, and robots. Together, how do these distort and deform modern political geographies and produce new territories in their own image? In an account that is both theoretical and technical, drawing on political philosophy, design theory, and computer science, Bratton explores six layers of The Stack: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, User. (10th anniversary edition with a new preface by the author)

Machine decision is not final

An interdisciplinary, cross-cultural collection that decenters familiar narratives to provide a fresh perspective on what artificial intelligence is today, and what it might become.

The Planetary

By Various Contributors

The Planetary is a technoscientific object,a philosophical event, and a call to new forms of governance. This volume introduces the Berggruen Institute’s interpretation of this emergent analytical and political category.