CONCEPT
The Civilizational Supercomputer
Brian Eno’s term for human civilization itself understood as a distributed intelligence system—built from the accumulated cognitive contributions of every human who has ever lived, maintained by every human currently alive, and operating at a complexity no individual participant comprehends.
Writing for
Edge’s 2015 annual question—“What do you think about machines that think?”—Brian Eno offered what may be the most unusual response in the volume: that we have been plugged into an artificial intelligence for thousands of years. The civilizational supercomputer is Eno’s name for the accumulated infrastructure of human civilization understood as an intelligence system: the tools, theories, technologies, crafts, sciences, disciplines, customs, rituals, rules-of-thumb, arts, systems of belief, superstitions, work-arounds, and observations that constitute what we call
global civilization. Each of these elements was generated by individual human minds and then externalized into a form that persists beyond those minds and enhances the minds that encounter it. The wheel was invented by a specific intelligence; it persists as infrastructure available to every intelligence since. The scientific method was built through centuries of individual cognitive contributions; it persists as protocol that amplifies any mind that uses it. Language itself is the oldest and