Benjamin Bratton

Join Antikythera, @csm_news Narrative Environments & Digital Innovation, and @tankmagazine on Thursday, July 9 in London for a lecture and mixer launching Agentworld—a new research unit on the hybrid society of 8 billion human minds and a trillion non-human AI minds. What even is a "society"? A keynote lecture: What is Agency?: Placebo Culture, Agency Theater, Agentic AI by @bratton will be followed by a post-lecture mixer at Spiritland to continue the conversation over food and drinks. The lecture inaugurates a new research brief on Agentworld and an OPEN CALL for papers / projects to contribute to the Antikythera Journal for the Philosophy of Planetary Computation, published with MIT Press. Does AGI portend a future in which humans are left to manage the illusion of control? As agentic AI runs the material world under the hood, our place may be as a specialized leisure class: "Monitoring the Situation" via placebo dashboards, staging politics as a lifestyle content genre. By cultivating "agency porn" we have decoupled the experience of making an impact from any actual causal effect, so that we can feel like the protagonists of a machine we no longer steer. Or does Agentic AI portend a different future, one in which we learn to extend our agency in concert with legions of synthetic minds? If so what does that mean for how they reflect us back to ourselves? What kinds of interaction models are possible? What agent institutions are necessary? Do xenophobic instincts take over on behalf of a fundamentalist humanism or do new forms of symbiotic hybrid intelligences evolve? Read the PDF / Open Call @ agentworld.antikythera.org Register for lecture @ link.antikythera.org/whatisagency

At Antikythera we are launching a new research unit, Agentworld, that will explore agentic AI and hybrid agency from first principles: --The Demographic Crossover Point within Centaur Societies --Paradigms of Agency: Individuation and Decomposition --The Mirror Talks Back: Parasocial Shadows -- Open World Ecologies: Agent Lifeworlds --Real-to-Sim-to-Real Relays --Human-Agent Interaction Design --Agent Institutions --Agent Phenomenology and Theory of Minds --Xenosociality: Beyond Humanity-of-the-Gaps -- AHI (Artificial Hybrid Intelligence) We are accepting submissions for new research to be published in a special issue of the peer-reviewed Antikythera Journal (MIT Press) The Call for Papers/ Whitepaper may be downloaded at agentworld.antikythera.org