The Telos of Planetary-Scale Computation

Provenance (2017) by Julian-Faylona

Provenance (2017) by Julian-Faylona

<aside> ✴️ From Wikipedia:

Telos (/ˈtɛ.lɒs/; Greek: τέλος, translit. télos, lit. "end, 'purpose', or 'goal'") is a term used by philosopher Aristotle to refer to the full potential or inherent purpose or objective of a person or thing, similar to the notion of an 'end goal' or 'raison d'être'. Moreover, it can be understood as the "supreme end of man's endeavour".

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<aside> ✴️ From a lecture by Benjamin Bratton titled What is Planetary Scale Computation For?:

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[7:35] Bratton: Climate science is a way in which we have constructed a planetary-scale sensing, calculation, modeling, and simulation apparatus that has produced an image and construction of the planet that has provided us with fundamental knowledge. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the very concept of climate change itself, not the chemical and ecological phenomena, but the concept of climate change (the model of the statistical regularity that we refer to as "climate change") is itself an epistemological accomplishment of planetary-scale computation. Without that sensing, modeling, calculation, simulation apparatus, from satellites to temperature [sensing] to the supercomputing simulations, the very idea of climate change itself would not have been provided. [It] would not have been possible to produce other than through this technical abstraction.

[22:25] Bratton: What is it for? Planetary-Scale Computation should be understood as the means of and for the liberation and articulation of public reason, collective intelligence and technical abstraction as collective self-representation and self-composition.

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In 2015, to mark the 40th anniversary of Microsoft’s founding, Bill Gates sent an e-mail to Microsoft employees in which he stated that he and Paul Allen “set the goal of a computer on every desk and in every home” early on in the company’s history. Although Gates acknowledged “the opportunity to reach even more people and organizations around the world”, it is clear to us in 2022 that his goal of ubiquitous personal computing is not only just a possible future but an increasingly inevitable future if we believe that the world will continue to experience economic and technological development.

A goal, however, is not necessarily a purpose, is not necessarily a telos. A computer in every home, in every pocket, and in every room of every building is not an end in itself, at least from the standpoint of those sympathetic to humanist values. What, then, is the purpose of all these computers? Of all this computation?

Benjamin Bratton’s answer to this line of questioning in a lecture titled What is Planetary Computation For? — that plaentary-scale computation should act as the means for the collective sensing, representation, and articulation of public reason — is hard to disagree with. My view, and the view that most normal people would probably agree with, is that computers should ultimately be used in improving human lives. In what I’m assuming to be an instance of conceptual convergence with Bratton’s conception of planetary-scale computation, Microsoft’s Planetary Computer project was publicly announced by the company in April of 2020 [the Bratton lecture I reference was uploaded in Jan 2021] and outlines the various ways that their “Planetary Computer” can be used to model Earth’s climate or, in corpospeak, “to enable partners and customers to use the resulting output to enhance environmental decision-making in their organizational activities.”

My personal view is that we will all eventually recognize the telos of Planetary-Scale Computation [including the global communications networks that enable computation to be “planetary-scale”] to be decentralized media that enables increasingly disintermediated human connection at scale, with my thesis being that human connection represents both the means for minimizing existential risk [from climate change, pandemics, global war, etc.] and the ends to which a post-xrisk, post-scarcity world should seek to promote. Servers, data centers, fibre cables, cell towers, personal computers, phones — these are all just tools. Human connection is the end goal. The telos of Planetary-Scale Computation is human flourishing, human connection.

But that’s just my opinion. Certain anti-humanist, techno-accelerationist lines of thought [to clarify, techno-accelerationism need not necessarily be anti-humanist] would paradigmatically disagree with the implicit anthropocentrism of the view I’m espousing — these anti-humanist lines of thought are worth exploring, if only for its novelty. The Landian thesis is that techno-capitalism is itself transcendent in its radical inhumanity — the energetic, material, and even human biological matter-flows that form the substrate [i.e., data centers, neural network architectures, “the Cloud”, etc.] in which machine intelligences are able to conjugate and evolve are simply fulfilling their purpose in bringing about alien hyperintelligence. Humans instrumentalizing machines for humans? No, it is machines instrumentalizing humans for machines [reminiscent of Yuval Harari’s “These plants domesticated Homo Sapiens, rather than vice versa” idea] — or so the thesis goes.

I interpret Land’s anti-humanist techno-accelerationism as more descriptive than normative — i.e., More “This is what the world could look like” than “This is how the world should be.” Despite my belief that we should aim towards an approach to technology that empowers humans and humanity [this the party line of virtually every tech company, See: Mission/Purpose-Implied Futures], I concede that the rise of inhuman machinic hyperintelligences is a real possibility. I could very easily work backwards from any number of techno-dystopic visions and narrativize how present day realities so obviously foreshadowed them.

How far off are we really from being technically capable of establishing ...

technologically-enabled surveillance States powered by social credit systems, centralized financial controls, CBDCs, and ubiquitous facial/iris/gait recognition algorithms?
legions of autonomous drones carrying humanoid robots powered by dispersed networks of solar-powered waystations and LEO satellites?
mass-scale techno-serfdom enabled by trillion-parameter recommender and ad optimization ML models, trained via VR eye-tracking and biometric mood tracking of digital advertising and media consumption?

The same amount of time between the creation of Bitcoin and now, or 13 years? Between the incorporation of AWS and now, or 20 years? Between the first trans-atlantic phone call and now, 95 years? Can you really argue that we are that far off from potentially being able to realize a techno-dystopic future? That far off from auto-assembling, technocapital hyperintelligences? How many centuries? Decades? Years?

This line of thinking is considered uncouth and indecorous to articulate publicly within the business, technology, and investing community. Imagine asking a tech CEO his or her opinions on the potential of their soft/hardware in bringing about an inhuman technocapital singularity on a quarterly earnings call [after, of course, listening to the company’s prepared remarks on this or that tech-enabled social initiative, as is tradition]. Nevertheless, these lines of thinking continually circulate tech and tech-adjacent communities, regardless of whether or not they are polite to speak about in public.

This is the backdrop with which I look at ongoing and future developments in cloud computing, and technology in general. To what extent does this development enable human flourishing and human connection? To what extent does this development further the possibility of inhuman techno-dystopia?