Copernican Technology

Bratton's term, defined only in entry 7 of Accept All Cookies: a technology built to perceive or measure the world on the basis of a particular mental model which, when deployed, demonstrates that the model that produced it is wrong, "usually demonstrating that the engineer is not who, what, where, when, or how they imagined." The worldview then changes by eventual reform, incorporation, and resolution of old and new models. The telescope is the paradigm; AI is the current case, called "a Copernican technology" in passing in the Cognitive Infrastructures talk, where what it teaches about ourselves is "precious indeed." The technological counterpart of Copernican trauma: the trauma is the disclosure, the technology is the instrument that forces it.