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 processes of real world systems. As AI becomes infrastructural, infrastructures become intelligent. 

What kind of design space is this? What does it afford, enable, produce, and delimit? When AIs are simultaneously platforms, applications and users, what are the interfaces between society and its intelligent simulations? How can we understand AI Alignment not just as AI bending to society, but how societies evolve in relationship to AI? What kinds of Cognitive Infrastructures might be revealed and composed?

Many geopolitical dynamics today revolve around computation: hardware, software, networks, and cultural interpretations of digital forms. Data, and more importantly the right to model it, is now a sovereign substance, something over which and from which sovereignty itself is claimed. This marks a shift toward a more multipolar geopolitics, filled by hemispheres of influence, and the multipolarization of planetary scale computation into Hemispherical Stacks. These stacks extend from energy sourcing, intercontinental transmission, and cloud platforms to addressing systems, interface cultures and different guises of the “user.” As cloud platforms take on roles traditionally performed by modern states, albeit crossing national borders and oceans, conversely states are evolving into cloud platforms. The geopolitical tensions that arise in the friction between these two shifts frame the prospects of planetary governance. Hemispherical Stacks develops scenarios that consider the multipolarization of planetary computation.

Computation today poses technical challenges and contradictions; it also demands deep political and philosophical reconsideration. Ultimately, computation challenges intelligence itself, revealing comprehension as a function of modeling. For example, he scientific idea of “climate change” is a conceptual accomplishment of planetary scale computation. It is the output of sensors, simulations and supercomputers. As such, computation has made the contemporary notion of the planetary and the ‘Anthropocene’ conceivable, accountable, and actionable. What is planetary computation? How do we quantify and qualify it? What is it for?

AI and the philosophy of AI have evolved in a tight coupling, informing and delimiting one another. Our vocabulary’s ability to describe what artificial language is and is not marks a threshold where philosophy of AI must invent a new framework.

Synthetic Intelligence traces the implications of artificial intelligence, exploring the path cleared by the externalization of thought in technical systems. What is reflected back is not necessarily human-like. The view is beyond anthropomorphic notions of AI and toward fundamental concern with machine intelligence as, (in the words of Stanisław Lem), an existential technology. Areas of interest include large foundational models, natural and artificial language, models of mind, animal cognition, urban automation, machine sensing, anthropic bias, and the global history of machine intelligence beyond standard Western narratives. The questions posed must be drawn from diverse cultures and contexts but also invented in concert with the ongoing evolution of intelligence in all its guises. Synthetic Intelligence investigates the long-term implications of machine intelligence for philosophy, science, and design.

Recursive Simulations are simulations that not only represent the world but which act back upon what they simulate, completing a cycle of sensing and governing. This includes machine sensing technologies (vision, sound, touch, etc.), synthetic experiences and environments (including VR/AR), strategic scenario modeling (gaming, agent based systems), active simulations of complex architectures (digital twins), and computational simulations of natural systems that enable scientific inquiry & foresight (climate models and cellular/genomic simulations). All of these simultations pose fundamental questions about sensing and sensibility, world-knowing and worldmaking. They also have different relations to the real. While scientific simulations pose meaningful correspondence with the natural world and provide access to ground truths that would be otherwise inconceivable, virtual and augmented reality produce embodied experiences of simulated environments that purposefully take leave of ground truth. These two forms of simulation have inverse epistemological implications: one makes an otherwise inaccessible reality perceivable, while the other bends reality to suit what one wants to see. In between is where we live.

The evolutionary emergence of natural and artificial intelligence is moving towards the intentional conception and artificial composition of viable planetary systems. This conjoins two connotations of the term “planetarity”: one scientific/ astronomical and another normative/ philosophical. The first sense of planetary is the geophysical entity from which all terrestrial thought emerges. The second sense includes the deliberate and deliberative composition that is inspired by thought comprehending itself in such terms and grasping its implications. The present historical moment is defined by this paradoxical challenge: How can the ongoing emergence of planetary intelligence comprehend its own evolution and the astronomical preciousness of sapience, and simultaneously recognize itself in the reflection of the violence from which it emerged and against which it struggles to survive? As the evolution of planetary intelligence was grounded in cascading centuries of pilotless destruction, its future is now existentially entwined with a radically different career for composition, foresight and order. Taking this seriously demands a different sort of speculative and practical philosophy, and a corresponding sort of computation. Put directly, what future would make this past worth it?