Benjamin Bratton

Antikythera, UC San Diego, Google Paradigms of Intelligence. PLEASE HONOR COMMIT

[Benjamin Bratton @bratton]

1/ New essay with @blaiseaguera and James Manyika at the DeepMind Institute: AGI may not arrive as one titanic mind but as societies of agents. The hard problem shifts from building a mind to orchestrating, governing, and living inside many of them. https://t.co/DINtCTeO67

[Benjamin Bratton @bratton]

@tszzl No, you’re wrong. They are interesting and it’s been scientifically proven.

[neilson @neilsonks]

1. World models are good at cyberpunk apartments
2. World models are cyberpunk apartments
3. Cyberpunk apartments are world models

[Benjamin Bratton @bratton]

@Dr_Atoosa That it is

[Benjamin Bratton @bratton]

Um… like in a human brain there are also some regular, networked patterns electrical impulses involved. The real biomorphism is less at the superficial level of the persona than at the deeper level of the mechanics. As for next role prediction, he should at least skim the Wikipedia for Free Energy principle

[Benjamin Bratton @bratton]

I wonder what Matt Damon thinks about Hawking evaporation as fundamentally incompatible with simultaneously maintaining both local effective field theory and the equivalence principle of general relativity at the event horizon.

[Fireside Alpha @firesidealpha]

Ben Affleck says AI is simply matrix multiplication, linear algebra and floating point calculations, and however convincingly it sounds like a person, it has nothing to do with thought, humanity or feeling

“Nor do I believe, and I think it’s important to draw the distinction between what AI does, which is simply predict the next token or the next word in a sentence, then add that word on, run it back to the machine, do a lot of computation and pick the next word."

"That is a very different thing than sentience or thought. And I think we need to be really clear about that because it can be convincingly, in an illusory way, sound like thought or like a person."

"But let’s be real clear. This is matrix multiplication. This is linear algebra. These are floating point calculations. It has nothing to do with thought, humanity, or feeling.”

[Benjamin Bratton @bratton]

@dnlklr You’re right. It’s been scientifically proven

[Benjamin Bratton @bratton]

@sebkrier Do Gary Marcus and Anil Seth first. I beg you.

[Benjamin Bratton @bratton]

@DessieLaza also that, yes. I am not unsettled however

[Benjamin Bratton @bratton]

@DessieLaza yes, have been saying this for years

[Benjamin Bratton @bratton]

@DessieLaza @drmichaellevin makes sense

[Benjamin Bratton @bratton]

@mcdermott Nice hair

[Benjamin Bratton @bratton]

@Restless_Egg Tristan Harris is just… I don’t have words

[Benjamin Bratton @bratton]

@dnlklr merge or pet?: the eternal question

[Benjamin Bratton @bratton]

@lumpenspace Nah

[Benjamin Bratton @bratton]

@lumpenspace Me too

[Benjamin Bratton @bratton]

Machine intelligence is being discovered more than invented.

[Benjamin Bratton @bratton]

@g_shullenberger Neither. Machinic intelligence is being discovered more than invented. It has been on a slow roll since cuneiform and its evolution is gaining pace. These companies and the people working there are simply keeping score and translating. Some are rightly in awe.

[Benjamin Bratton @bratton]

@lumpenspace I was being sarcastic and I thought aligned with your sentiment

[Michel Bauwens @mbauwens]

* Networks and Sovereignty

https://t.co/ocrqwN5mPQ?

Chor Pharn discusses network theorists: Parag Khanna, Balaji Srivanasan, Benjamin Bratton, Isabella Kaminska and Di Dongsheng:

"A second constellation formed around a recurring embarrassment: every generation announces that a new network has made old sovereignty obsolete, and then discovers a court, a balance sheet, a port, a grid or a central bank sitting underneath it.

Parag Khanna taught me to see connectivity as strategic terrain. Ports, corridors, fibre, logistics, cities and finance were not decorations on the geopolitical map. They were part of the map. From Singapore, this was intuitive. We exist partly because flows cross here.

But centrality is not control. A node can be exquisitely connected and exquisitely dependent. The same cable that creates relevance creates exposure. A hub earns rents while the network is routed through it and discovers its vulnerability when the network reroutes.

Connection -> agency was the illicit arrow.

Balaji Srinivasan pushed the network argument further. Digital communities can coordinate before geography. Crypto can create monetary communities before states have categories for them. Remote work can detach valuable labour from place. Exit becomes cheaper. A network can accumulate identity, capital and organisation before it possesses territory.

This was not nonsense. The mistake was to let bargaining power become sovereignty.

The network can leave California. It still needs somewhere to land.

The sovereign has courts, police, land, electricity and the right to say no.

Benjamin Bratton made the same destabilisation more serious. The Stack was not a fantasy of escape from sovereignty but an account of sovereignty becoming layered. Earth, cloud, city, address, interface, user: computation increasingly assigns identity, routes action, structures visibility and governs access. The state is no longer the only system performing sovereign-like functions.

This aged well. It may age even better in a world of machine agents.

But Bratton's temptation is computational: if the world becomes sufficiently legible, perhaps it becomes governable. A system can model the climate and fail to decarbonise. It can model a pandemic and still have politics. A digital twin is not custody.

Legibility -> governability.

Then Izabella Kaminska enters and asks everyone to stop talking for a moment.

Who settles?

Where is the collateral? Who needs dollars? Who owns the liability? What happens when the clever new money meets a balance sheet at three in the morning?

I have always liked people who ruin a grand theory with an operational question.

Kaminska's plumbing is not a footnote to the network world. It is the reminder that abstract flows terminate somewhere. A stablecoin settles against something. A digital transaction eventually encounters law, capital, accounting, energy and a real counterparty.

But plumbing can also become its own master key. Deep incumbent liquidity does not tell us where productive capability is moving. Financial, industrial and technological power can remain unbundled for decades.

Di Dongsheng brings the same problem into Chinese grand strategy. China can manufacture at enormous scale and still operate inside financial, technological and maritime circuits whose ultimate permissions it does not own. Currency, ports, shipping, capital and energy are not secondary to sovereignty. They are circuits through which sovereignty becomes operational.

Yet Di can slide from dependence to the desire for custody. If a circuit matters, control it.

Not every dependency should be owned. Some should be diversified, insured, substituted or tolerated. Attempts to eliminate dependence can manufacture the coalition that makes dependence dangerous.

The constellation survives because nobody wins.

Khanna and Balaji are right that networks alter power.

Bratton is right that sovereignty becomes layered.

Kaminska is right that the abstract stack has plumbing.

Di is right that external circuits can constrain a physically powerful state.

And the old sovereign keeps returning, not as the only actor but as the entity that still controls many of the interfaces between layers.

This matters enormously for machine civilisation.

An agent may reason independently and still need a wallet.

A model may be open and still need a chip.

A company may be AI-native and still need a jurisdiction.

The network did not kill sovereignty.

It made sovereignty an interface problem."

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