---
title: "Artificialization"
description: "Bratton's term for intelligence remaking its surroundings into external, designed systems; the pivot of the research statement's closing argument. Two senses are stacked."
type: "glossary-term"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/terms/artificialization"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/terms/artificialization"
last_updated: "2026-09-06"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Artificialization

> A working definition written for this wiki from the reading notes; not Antikythera's own wording. From Antikythera Wiki (https://antikythera.wiki/terms/artificialization), an independent guide to Antikythera's published work.

Bratton's term for intelligence remaking its surroundings into external, designed systems; the pivot of the research statement's closing argument. Two senses are stacked. Locally, calling chips and software "artificial" marks them as products of conceptual prefiguration rather than blind evolution, not as fakes. Generally, via Walker and Cronin's assembly theory, artificialization is allopoiesis: populations that transform their niche capture more energy, matter and information, so evolution selects for the capacity itself, with intelligence and technology as its co-evolving scaffolds. The payoff question is what happens when intelligence, the driver of artificialization, is itself artificialized; the answer, sharpened in SPoC, is that AI is "the artificialization of artificialization," replicating autopoietically and allopoietically, "life" if not alive, and so not a tool. The Noocene calls the same loop recursive niche construction; Accept All Cookies adds that to artificialize something is to rediscover it. Compare Allopoiesis, Scaffolding and Terraforming (of Earth).

## Appears in

- [Planetary Sapience Symposium](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/planetarysapience) (2025-11-21)
- [The Noocene](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/noocene) (2025-11-21)
- [Accept All Cookies](https://antikythera.wiki/work/book/accept-all-cookies) (2025-05-10)
- [Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/spoc) (2025-05-10)
- [Antikythera](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/research) (2025-05-10)
- [The Planetary](https://antikythera.wiki/work/book/the-planetary) (2024-11-10)

_Glossary generated 2026-09-06._