Cognitive Exoskeleton

The research statement's figure for planetary computation seen at geological time-scale: run the blue-marble image as a 4.5-billion-year movie and, in the last few seconds, the planet grows "an external layer of satellites, cities, and various physical networks, all of which constitute a kind of sensory epidermis or exoskeleton." Through this artificial crust Earth "has realized incipient forms of animal–machinic cognition with terraforming-scale agency" — planetary computation as "a geological cognitive phenomenon," not a tool. The 57 Ideas lecture draws the corollary: the exoskeleton was built by a form of life the planet itself evolved, so intelligence is "something that a planet does." Boyadjiev's "cognitive exoskeleton" carries the same image into the What Is Intelligence? / Cognitive Infrastructures frame — a prosthesis that both enables and discloses planetary intelligence. Companion to The Stack's accidental megastructure; the ambiguity between revealing and producing intelligence is left open.