Computation
Description
Benjamin Bratton:
"Computation is calculation as world ordering; it is a medium for the complexification of social intelligence.
Computation takes the form of planetary infrastructure that remakes philosophy, science, and society in its image.
How does Antikythera define computation? For Turing, it was a process defined by a mathematical limit of the incalculable, but as the decades since his foundational papers have shown, there is little in life that cannot be modeled and represented computationally. This process, like all models, is reductive. A map reduces territory to an image, but that is how it becomes useful as a navigational tool. Similarly, computational models and simulations synthesize data in ways that demonstrate forms and patterns that would be otherwise inconceivable.
As a rules-based, output-generating operation, computation has general and specific definitions, including biological analogical processing of very local information and Universal Turing machines, general recursive functions, and the defined calculations of almost anything at all.
Antikythera presumes that computation was discovered as much as it was invented. It is not so much that natural computation works like modern computing devices but rather that modern computing devices and formulations are quickly evolving approximations of natural computation—genetic, molecular, neuronal, etc.
Computation as a principle may be near universal, but computation as a societal medium is highly malleable. Its everyday affordances are seemingly endless. However, computational technologies evolve, and societies evolve in turn. For example, in the decades to come, what is called “AI” may no longer be simply a novel application for computation but its primary societal-scale form. Computation would be not just an instrumentally focused calculation but the basis of widespread non-biological intelligence.
Through computational models, we perceive existential truths about a great many things: human genomic drift through history, the visual profile of astronomic objects millions of light-years away, the extent of anthropogenic agency and its climatic effects, the neurological foundations of thought itself… The qualitative profundity of these begins with a quantitative representation. The math discloses reality, and reality demands new philosophical scrutiny."
(https://research.antikythera.org/)
Discussion
Planetary Computation
Benjamin Bratton:
" Imagine the famous blue marble image as a movie, one spanning all 4.5 billion years of Earth’s development. Watching this movie on super fast-forward, one would see the planet turn from red to blue and green, see continents form and break apart, see the emergence of life and an atmosphere, and, in the last few seconds, see something else that is remarkable. The planet would almost instantaneously grow an external layer of satellites, cities, and various physical networks, all of which constitute a kind of sensory epidermis or exoskeleton. In the last century, Earth has grown this artificial crust, through which it has realized incipient forms of animal–machinic cognition with terraforming-scale agency. This is planetary computation. It is not just a tool, it is a geological cognitive phenomenon.
It is this phenomenon—planetary computation defined in this way—that is Antikythera’s core interest. The term has at least two essential connotations: first, it refers to a global technological apparatus; second, it refers to all the ways that that apparatus reveals planetary conditions in a manner otherwise unthinkable. For the former, computation is an instrumental technology that enables new perceptions of and interactions with the world; for the latter, it is an epistemological technology that shifts fundamental presumptions about what is possible to know about the world at all."