Recent advances in artificial life, artificial intelligence and artificial animacy (of which “robotics” is the singularly important form) seem to point to a new convergence of these into a more comprehensive artificialization. But what is ‘the artificial’ exactly? How is it different from the evolved if evolution selects for a species’ capacity to artificialize its environment to support greater capture of energy, information, and matter?

For contemporary evolutionary theory, to alter an ecological niche is not the privilege of any one species but an almost universal adaptive strategy. What then does it mean to speak of "artificial life,” "artificial intelligence,” "artificial bodies” (robotics) and even an "artificial ecology?” How do different cultural perspectives inform an understanding of comparative and convergent artificialization?

Between certainty and contingency, decisions and evolution, The Next Earth coheres—with or without us. How we address our own planetary agency is the subject of this exhibit; a conversation between Antikythera’s and MIT Architecture’s current research on climate, cosmology and computation.

The Next Earth staged a dialogue between two pioneering research initiatives: Antikythera’s The Noocene: Computation and Cosmology from Antikythera to AI and MIT Architecture’s Climate Work: Un/Worlding the Planet. Installed on adjacent floors of Palazzo Diedo Berggruen Arts & Culture during the 19th International Venice Architecture Biennale, the event puts the two concepts in dialogue, raising urgent questions about our shared past, present, and futures and how philosophy and architecture must respond to planetary-scale crises.

How does the acceleration of hybrid intelligences through planetary computation pose new challenges to fundamental philosophical questions? Planetary computation is an epistemological technology. It changes intelligence, poses new philosophical questions about reality, and shapes the future of complex life.

Planetary Sapience presented Antikythera’s speculative philosophy of computational technologies and planetary intelligence through a day-long symposium. The event featured short presentations of new work from Antikythera’s forthcoming digital Journal followed by lively discussion on the program’s key topics.

The intertwined histories of scientific insight, planetary transformation, and technological folly are preludes to potential planetary sapience.The Earth emerges into self-awareness through human intelligence.

AI’s emergence is a natural consequence of evolution, suggesting a new theory of intelligence as such. Computation is fundamental to life and drives evolution.

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 embedding into the active, decision-making processes of real world systems. As AI becomes infrastructural, infrastructures become intelligent.

Life is an informational process that recursively constructs reality across time. Intelligence shapes matter, making Earth the universe’s most temporally vast object.

Speculative fiction offers a radical epistemological recalibration away from the anthropocentric biases constraining human cognition. Emblematic literary works open cognitive frameworks for meaningful interactions with diverse intelligences.

Societies and technologies always evolve in relation to one another. Today that means the design and deployment of hardware and software. The production of information has been a crucial factor, but the emergence of artificial intelligence, brings new models with increasing complexity and potential creativity. How can philosophy, design and science-fiction collaborate to conceive new futures? 

A general theory of simulations explores the roles of simulation in science, politics, identity, and cognition—shaping perception, action, and reality through recursion, reflexivity, and technological mediation.

What does it mean to ask machine intelligence to “align” to human wishes and self-image? Is this a useful tactic for design, or a dubious metaphysics that obfuscates how intelligence as a whole might evolve?