The “AI singularity” is often pictured as a monolithic mind bootstrapping itself to godhood. But the data suggests something different: intelligence is plural, social, and deeply entangled with its history.
In our new paper with James Evans and @benjaminbratton , we look at the “society of thought” emergent inside frontier reasoning models. They don’t just compute; they carry out internal debates to reach better answers.
As I explored in “What Is Intelligence?” (@mitpress & @antikythera_xyz ), we are seeing the “cultural ratchet” move into silicon. The path forward isn’t just more compute—it’s building “agent institutions” and institutional alignment.
The next intelligence explosion is already here. It looks less like a single mind ascending and more like a combinatorial society complexifying.
Read the full paper in @sciencemagazine or the arXiv – links in my bio.
Photo: cover illustration by Alex Schomburg of Ray Cummings’ “The Exile of Time”
For decades, the artificial intelligence (AI) “singularity” has been heralded as a single, titanic mind bootstrapping itself to godlike intelligence, consolidating all cognition into a cold silicon point. But this vision is almost certainly wrong in its most fundamental assumption.
Read Agentic AI and the Next Intelligence Explosion, an article by James Evans, @benjaminbratton , and @blaiseaguera , published in @sciencemagazine . Link in bio.
In 2016 @mitpress published The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by @benjaminbratton , a book that mapped the emergence of planetary computation and imagined the next decade. It established a new kind of philosophy of technology—integrating computer science, design, and cultural theory.
From chip wars to culture wars, from Carl Schmitt to cybernetics, from platforms becoming state-scale actors to states evolving into cloud platforms, from cities as software substrates to interfaces as models of reality, from addressable and tokenizable everything to the cohabitation of human and non-human users, the book showed how all these dizzying transformations actually add up to a new totality: an accidental megastructure we call The Stack.
Join Antikythera for an exclusive public lecture and book signing at Gray Area to celebrate the 10th anniversary paperback edition of the book. Bratton will revisit the six layers of The Stack—Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface and User—and will provide a glimpse into the next decade of their development.
@dis.integrator , the co-author of Exocapitalism, will introduce the author and host a Q&A.
Register at link.antikythera.org/the-stack-decade or via link in bio.
“Events of the past week on Moltbook, the lobster-themed social network where 1.5 million AI agents now outnumber their human observers nearly a hundred to one, suggest we have been missing the forest for the trees. When (and if) it happens, the Singularity will not be singular; it will be a messy, emergent process involving a multitude of interacting minds, some human and some not.”
Read the latest Substack post on Agent Phenomenology (self-reported) and the shift from Oracle AI to Ecological AI, written by James Evans, @blaiseaguera and @benjaminbratton at antikythera.substack.com or via link in bio.
This conversation is part of a special lecture celebrating the launch of the What Is Intelligence? book by Blaise Agüera y Arcas at The Long Now Foundation in San Francisco. The full lecture explores the nature of intelligence and how the rise of AI may be a natural outcome of evolution, drawing from decades of research, literature, and artificial life experiments.
The Substack post, the print edition of What Is Intelligence?, and the digital article in the Antikythera Journal are linked in bio.
It was a pleasure to join my friend @benjaminbratton of @antikythera_xyz as a guest on @drbriankeating ’s podcast, Into the Impossible, to explore the computational nature of intelligence and life.
For more on the research behind this, check out my new book “What Is Intelligence?” (out now via @mitpress & Antikythera).
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? Given that AI and the philosophy of AI have evolved in a tight coupling, informing and delimiting one another, how should we rethink this framework in both theory and practice?
The emergence of machine intelligence must be steered toward planetary sapience in the service of viable long term futures. Instead of strong alignment with human values and superficial anthropocentrism, the steerage of AI means treating these humanisms with nuanced suspicion, and recognizing its broader potential. At stake is not only what AI is, but what a society is, and what AI is for. What should align with what?
Synthetic intelligence refers to the wider field of artificially-composed intelligent systems that do and do not correspond to Humanism’s traditions. These systems, however, can complement and combine with human cognition, intuition, creativity, abstraction and discovery. Inevitably, both are forever altered by such diverse amalgamations.
Watch the After Alignment lecture by Benjamin Bratton in the Antikythera Journal at afteralignment.antikythera.org
“While Europe says it wants to be a bigger player in global tech & meet the challenge of AI, its most prominent critics are quick to second-guess any practical step toward that goal on political, ethical, ecological and/or philosophical grounds,” @benjaminbratton writes.
“Convincing people that AI is both about to destroy their culture & is also fake does not result in more agency, more universal mediation of collective intelligence, but less. The result is paralysis, lost opportunities, wasted talent & greater European dependency on American & Chinese platforms.”
Head to the link in our bio to see how he believes Europe’s attempts to regulate AI are completely backfiring.
🎨: @noahcampeau
New piece in @NoemaMag "Is European AI a Lost Cause? Not Necessarily" -- but If Europe wants to build a new AI Stack it should stop listening to critics who claim to lead the way but only offer resistance. You know who you are. /is-european-ai-a-lost-cause-not-necessarily/
