57 Ideas on Cognitive Infrastructures: Synthetic Intelligence in the Wild

As AI becomes both more general and more foundational, it shouldn’t be seen as a disembodied virtual brain. It is a real, material force. AI is embedded into the active, decision-making processes of real world systems. As AI becomes infrastructural, infrastructures become intelligent. Natural Intelligence emerges at environmental scale and in the interactions of multiple agents. It is located not only in brains but in landscapes. Similarly, artificial intelligence is not contained within single artificial minds but extends throughout the networks of planetary computation: it is baked into industrial processes; it generates images and text; it coordinates circulation in cities; it senses, models, and acts in the wild. This represents an infrastructuralization of AI, but also a “making cognitive” of both new and legacy infrastructures. These are capable of responding to us, to the world, and to each other in ways we recognize as embedded and networked cognition. Cognitive Infrastructures are forming, framing, and evolving a new ecology of planetary intelligence. The lecture 57 Ideas on Cognitive Infrastructures: Synthetic Intelligence in the Wild explores this work as part of Antikythera’s Summer Studio on Cognitive Infrastructures, based at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London and hosted by CSM MA Narrative Environments and Digital Innovation. This lecture builds on the After Alignment keynote, filmed in 2023.