Today, we're exploring whether the Earth itself is developing intelligence through us. Soon, you'll discover why the world's first computer wasn't built to crunch numbers, but to map our place in the cosmos. My guest today is Ben Bratton, a professor, a visionary philosopher of technology, and a man whose work has redefined intelligence at planetary scales. He's the perfect person to explore this mind bending concept. Ben argues that AI isn't just another tool. It's the planet evolving a nervous system. But here's the twist. Are we training artificial intelligence? Or, terrifyingly, is AI training us? First, we'll unpack computation as a natural force of the universe.

Then, we'll ask, is Earth itself becoming conscious? Join us as we reimagine humanity's role in the greatest evolutionary leap since life began.

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the best parts about doing a podcast is that you get to invite your friends and people that you are so inspired by, and that's no exception for you. But I wanna start with this new project that dovetails so beautifully with what I do, which is, you know, possibly the existence of planetary scale computing and so forth. And, I thought we could start there with this concept that I'm trying to learn how to pronounce Antikythera. Antikythera. Antikythera. So what is Antikythera, and why should we care about this as you know, speaking to the most brilliant minds in the multiverse, a lot of them are astronomers.

I should say, first of all, that, you know, I call myself a philosopher of technology. Right? I'm coming from the humanities side

of the house, but Visual arts. Right? That's your

In the Department of Visual Arts, very easy to see. Right? But I'm a little bit, unusual in this regard. That is I I take a very intense and sincere interest in what science is doing and the way in which emerging technologies not only allow us to do new things, but to know new things. The relationship between philosophy and science has been one that has been, you know, variously contentious, but also one that had a very, tight genealogical relationship sometime. Right? And so you may have people like, I don't know, Lawrence Krauss, who sort of see them as strongly opposed to one another, whereas others, like myself, may recognize that all the sciences that we recognize today, one way or another, began as philosophies. Right. So, like, you were saying, like, when philosophy learns to ask the right questions, a new science is born. But when so where do new philosophies come from? They might also say when when tech new technologies force us to realize that the languages and concepts that we've been using to understand the world are are inadequate or anachronistic.

Moments like these when philosophy, I think, becomes most useful in a in a creative and generative sense. Mhmm. Right? So it's less about how do I take these these concepts and apply them to new things? What would Hegel think about driverless cars? What would what would Kant say about this telescope? But rather, how do we generate the concepts that are allowed to to bring something new? So Antikythera. Antikythera is named after the what is probably apocryphally, the first known computer. Mhmm. Was, from February BC. It was discovered off the island of Antikythera in Greece in, the beginning of the twentieth century, and it took a really long time to figure out what it was because it was this intricate, complex, geared mechanism that in the course of technological evolution, and I should say I actually believe that technology evolves in a literal sense. It was completely anomalous.

There wasn't a, you know, a a Predecessor technology. Yes. Predecessor species before or after to one where iPhone version one, you know. Exactly. Exactly. So what eventually was figured out that it was, in fact, a a computational device. But it in addition to being a device that allowed you to do basic mathematics, it also was an astronomical device. It allowed you to map the your position in relationship to the stars and planets, not only in the present, but also in the past and future.