As AI becomes both more general and more foundational, it shouldn’t be seen as a disembodied virtual brain. It is a real, material force. AI is embedded into the active, decision making systems of real world systems. As AI becomes infrastructural, infrastructures become intelligent.

As artificial intelligence becomes infrastructural, and as societal infrastructures concurrently become more cognitive, the relation between AI theory and practice needs realignment. Across scales – from world-datafiction and data visualization to users and UI, and back again – many of the most interesting problems in AI design are still embryonic.

Natural Intelligence emerges at environmental scale and in the interactions of multiple agents. It is located not only in brains but in active landscapes. Similarly, artificial intelligence is not contained within single artificial minds but extends throughout the networks of planetary computation: it is baked into industrial processes; it generates images and text; it coordinates circulation in cities; it senses, models and acts in the wild.

This represents an infrastructuralization of AI, but also a ‘making cognitive’ of both new and legacy infrastructures. These are capable of responding to us, to the world and to each other in ways we recognize as embedded and networked cognition.

AI is physicalized, from user interfaces on the surface of handheld devices to deep below the built environment. As we interact with the world, we retrain model weights, making actions newly reflexive in knowing that performing an action is also a way of representing it within a model. To play with the model is to remake the model, increasingly in real time.

How might this frame human-AI interaction design? What happens when the production and curation of data is for increasingly generalized, multimodal and foundational, models? How might the collective intelligence of generative AI make the world not only queryable, but re-composable in new ways? How will simulations collapse the distances between the virtual and the real? How will human societies align toward the insights and affordances of artificial intelligence, rather than AI bending to human constructs? Ultimately, how will the inclusion of a fuller range of planetary information, beyond traces of individual human users, expand what counts as intelligence?

Individual users will not only interact with big models, but multiple combinations of models will interact with groups of people in overlapping combinations. Perhaps the most critical and unfamiliar interactions will unfold between different AIs without human interference.

Cognitive Infrastructures are forming, framing, and evolving a new ecology of planetary intelligence.