Planetary Sapience | NOEMA
Metadata
Highlights
- For contemporary philosophy, the provocative concept of the planetary (and its corollary, “planetarity”) has been put forward as an alternative to “the global,” an expired notion that is static and flattened and Eurocentric.
- Planetary-scale computation is an example of what may be called, after the great Polish novelist Stanislaw Lem, an “epistemological technology.” The most important social impact of some technologies is not just in what they allow people to do, but in what they reveal about how the world works.
- The technologies of a planetary society are ongoing processes over which we have agency. In its current commercial form, the primary purpose of planetary-scale computation is to measure and model individual people in order to predict their next impulse. But a more aspirational goal would be to contribute to the comprehension, composition and enforcement of a shared future that is more rich, diverse and viable.
- Instead of reviving ideas of nature, we must reclaim the artificial — not fake, but designed. For this, human-machine intelligence and urban-scale automation become part of an expanded landscape of life, information and labor. They are part of a living ecology, not a substitute for one. Put more specifically: The response to anthropogenic climate change will need to be equally anthropogenic.
- The critical apparatuses of such a response include automation, (understood as an ecological principle of inter-entanglement more than a reductive autonomy); geoengineering (understood in terms of climate-scale effects more than a specific portfolio of techniques); the rotation of planetary-scale computation away from individual users and toward processes more relevant for long-term ecological viability; the deliberate self-design of sapient species toward variation, including reproductive technologies, universal medical services and synthetic gene therapies; the cultivation of artificial mathematical, linguistic and robotic intelligences with which general sapience deliberately evolves; the deployment of experimental expertise with biotechnologies, through which living matter composes living matter; the intensification of urban habitats and technologies as media for the general provision of universal and niche services; the projective migration outside the Kármán line, the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space, from where the existing and potential terrestrial planetarity comes into focus; and, finally, the aggregation of creative governing intelligences capable of architecting such mobilizations.
- When I visited a factory in Shenzhen that makes cases for Android phones and employs many robots and people working side by side, I was struck by an unexpected feeling, a kind of serenity. The mood was calm, not frantic. Some things were moving quickly but quietly, while other things were quite still, as if waiting their turn. It did not feel like a “factory” in the Charlie Chaplin sense; it felt much more like a garden of machines in the Richard Brautigan sense.
title: “Planetary Sapience | NOEMA”
author: “noemamag.com”
url: ”https://www.noemamag.com/planetary-sapience”
date: 2023-12-19
source: hypothesis
tags: media/articles
Planetary Sapience | NOEMA
Metadata
Highlights
- For contemporary philosophy, the provocative concept of the planetary (and its corollary, “planetarity”) has been put forward as an alternative to “the global,” an expired notion that is static and flattened and Eurocentric.
- Planetary-scale computation is an example of what may be called, after the great Polish novelist Stanislaw Lem, an “epistemological technology.” The most important social impact of some technologies is not just in what they allow people to do, but in what they reveal about how the world works.
- The technologies of a planetary society are ongoing processes over which we have agency. In its current commercial form, the primary purpose of planetary-scale computation is to measure and model individual people in order to predict their next impulse. But a more aspirational goal would be to contribute to the comprehension, composition and enforcement of a shared future that is more rich, diverse and viable.
- Instead of reviving ideas of nature, we must reclaim the artificial — not fake, but designed. For this, human-machine intelligence and urban-scale automation become part of an expanded landscape of life, information and labor. They are part of a living ecology, not a substitute for one. Put more specifically: The response to anthropogenic climate change will need to be equally anthropogenic.
- The critical apparatuses of such a response include automation, (understood as an ecological principle of inter-entanglement more than a reductive autonomy); geoengineering (understood in terms of climate-scale effects more than a specific portfolio of techniques); the rotation of planetary-scale computation away from individual users and toward processes more relevant for long-term ecological viability; the deliberate self-design of sapient species toward variation, including reproductive technologies, universal medical services and synthetic gene therapies; the cultivation of artificial mathematical, linguistic and robotic intelligences with which general sapience deliberately evolves; the deployment of experimental expertise with biotechnologies, through which living matter composes living matter; the intensification of urban habitats and technologies as media for the general provision of universal and niche services; the projective migration outside the Kármán line, the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space, from where the existing and potential terrestrial planetarity comes into focus; and, finally, the aggregation of creative governing intelligences capable of architecting such mobilizations.
- When I visited a factory in Shenzhen that makes cases for Android phones and employs many robots and people working side by side, I was struck by an unexpected feeling, a kind of serenity. The mood was calm, not frantic. Some things were moving quickly but quietly, while other things were quite still, as if waiting their turn. It did not feel like a “factory” in the Charlie Chaplin sense; it felt much more like a garden of machines in the Richard Brautigan sense.