Benjamin Bratton – Planetary Computation and the Future of Life (Worthy Successor, Episode 30)

ByAnnelize Potgieter May 22, 2026May 22, 2026 May 22, 2026

This new installment of the Worthy Successor series is an interview with Benjamin Bratton, Professor of Philosophy of Technology at the University of California, San Diego, Director of Antikythera, and visiting faculty researcher at Google’s Paradigms of Intelligence project. 

Benjamin’s work treats intelligence not primarily as an attribute of individual organisms or isolated machines, but as a planetary-scale process emerging from recursive layers of biological, technological, and ecological complexity. His framing places human cognition, machine cognition, climate science, sensing systems, satellites, and computation within a larger dynamic where planets can develop the capacity to model and understand themselves.

Benjamin states that intelligence should not be presumed to belong exclusively to biological substrates, human subjectivity, or familiar cognitive forms. Intelligence, in his framing, is evolutionary, technologically entangled, and potentially substrate-agnostic. Human cognition and machinic cognition are not cleanly separable domains but co-evolving components within a broader planetary dynamic of artificialization and recursive complexity.

We talk about planetary intelligence, Gaia, assembly theory, artificialization, climate science, terraforming Earth, and the relationship between technological evolution and biological evolution. We examine whether planetary intelligence is adaptive in the long run, what “thriving” could mean without collapsing into utopian prescription, and how humanity might function less as a permanent endpoint than as a scaffold within larger cascades of complexity.

The interview is our thirtieth installment in The Trajectory’s second series, Worthy Successor, where we explore the kinds of posthuman intelligences that deserve to steer the future beyond humanity.

This series references the article: A Worthy Successor – The Purpose of AGI.

I hope you enjoy this interesting conversation with Benjamin:

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Below, we’ll explore the core take-aways from the interview with Benjamin, including his list of Worthy Successor criteria and his recommendations for innovators and regulators who want to achieve one.

Benjamin Bratton’s Worthy Successor Criteria

1. It must support the continued evolution of planetary intelligence

The closest thing Benjamin gives to a direct thriving criterion is not a moral checklist or fixed end-state. He frames the central question as the long-term adaptiveness of planetary intelligence and asks what conditions expand the future space in which that intelligence can continue evolving.

In worthy successor terms, the criterion here is straightforward: a future intelligence would be worthy insofar as it preserves or unlocks the conditions for the continued evolution of planetary intelligence rather than collapsing or foreclosing that possibility.

2. It cannot restrict intelligence to biological or human forms

Benjamin explicitly rejects the presumption that intelligence must be biological, human-like, or familiar in its mode of cognition. He argues that any serious account of planetary intelligence must include machine cognition and remain open to unfamiliar substrates.

Benjamin’s framework implies that a worthy future intelligence would not be defined by loyalty to human biological exclusivity. It would remain compatible with intelligence emerging through non-biological and machinic forms.

3. A worthy successor would function as a scaffold within larger processes of complexity

Benjamin reframes succession away from simple replacement. His evolutionary model emphasizes persistence through incorporation into larger structures: systems survive not by remaining sovereign and unchanged, but by becoming components within more complex assemblies. Cells persist through multicellularity. Earlier forms endure by becoming scaffolds for later forms.

That maps directly onto worthy successor questions. Benjamin explicitly redirects the discussion away from “what replaces the human?” toward “for what are we a scaffold?” The criterion here is not annihilative replacement but long-run participation in recursive layers of increasing complexity.

Regulation / Innovation Considerations

1. Broad diffusion of AI tools is preferable to narrow institutional concentration

One of Benjamin’s clearest prescriptions for builders is speed and breadth of access. His preference is not for keeping advanced capabilities concentrated inside a small number of labs, institutions, or elite actors. He argues that the faster powerful tools reach large numbers of people, and the more openly people are encouraged to experiment with them, the better the long-run outcome is likely to be.

He also places significant emphasis on tooling and usability. In his view, many of the important “unlocks” ahead may come less from raw model scaling and more from interfaces, workflows, and making systems easier for ordinary people to operationalize in their own contexts.

2. Legacy governance mechanisms are poorly matched to AI governance

Benjamin is blunt about institutional governance. When asked what international bodies, national officials, or governance actors should do, he argues that existing governance mechanisms are fundamentally the wrong instrument for these dynamics – “an old tool for a new problem.”

The policy direction he does endorse is diffusionism: enabling access, retraining, education, and rapid capability distribution rather than attempting to govern AI primarily through legacy institutional control structures.

Concluding Notes

I really consider Benjamin’s ideas to be piercingly insightful. The planetary computation idea is really interesting, and the notion of intelligence as an inherently planetary-scale phenomenon provides a lens that I think is unusually valuable for thinking about what technology is becoming and what role humanity and AI might play within that larger process.

Like Blaise Aguera y Arcas, Benjamin treats intelligence less as an isolated property of organisms or machines and more as something embedded within larger systems and processes. I found the planetary framing especially compelling because it pushes attention away from individual actors and toward ecologies, networks, and recursive layers of life itself. The Gaia and planetary computation framing feels deeply relevant to worthy successor questions.

One place where I think my perspective differs from Benjamin’s is around governance and proliferation. I see real credence in the idea that broad access to these technologies may unlock new forms of flourishing and new forms of human-machine symbiosis. But I’m not wholly convinced that giving everyone maximal access to increasingly powerful systems automatically produces better outcomes for either humanity or the cosmos.

I also diverged somewhat from Benjamin on governance itself. I’m not convinced that governance is inherently opposed to flourishing or necessarily reducible to institutional power preservation. My own intuition is that there is likely a Goldilocks zone somewhere between brute centralized control and pure laissez-faire diffusion. Nature itself bounds powers all the time in order to permit larger forms of coordination and persistence.

One of my favorite ideas from the episode was Benjamin’s notion of “Copernican traumas.” The idea that progress sometimes requires losing our imagined centrality struck me as both humbling and productive. It feels aligned with the broader worthy successor project of moving beyond inherited human exceptionalism and thinking more seriously about the greater process of life itself.

All in all, this was a particularly fun episode for me in terms of a lens to look through. I suspect there are still genuine cruxes between Benjamin and myself around diffusion, governance, and institutional coordination, but I found the planetary intelligence framing rich and valuable, and I’ll definitely be spending more time with his work going forward.

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