---
title: "Existential Technologies"
description: "Bogna Konior's category for technologies that redirect the evolutionary path of the species across deep time, so that the question is not whether humans persist but what they persist as."
type: "glossary-term"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/terms/existential-technologies"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/terms/existential-technologies"
last_updated: "2026-09-06"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Existential Technologies

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

[Bogna Konior](https://antikythera.wiki/people/bogna-konior)'s category for technologies that redirect the evolutionary path of the species across deep time, so that the question is not whether humans persist but what they persist as. She builds it from Lem's Summa Technologiae, where humans "have not yet grown" while their capacity for good and evil has, and opposes it to functional technologies (weapons, medicine, media), whose harms are legible because people use them on other people. Existential technologies are morally opaque in a stronger sense: they may dissolve the ideals by which they would be judged, often visibly only in retrospect. Language is her paradigm; gnostic and anthropoforming technologies are her sub-kinds, and the framework answers long-termism's confidence in a legible future. Bratton uses the same term, also credited to Lem, more narrowly: telescopes, microscopes and computation that change how the world is understood, filed here under Epistemological Technology and matching only Konior's gnostic subset.

## Appears in

- [Planetary Sapience Symposium](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/planetarysapience) (2025-11-21)
- [Diffusion: A New Venture for Antikythera](https://antikythera.wiki/work/substack/2025-09-25-diffusion-a-new-venture-for-antikythera) (2025-09-25)
- [57 Ideas & Questions about Cognitive Infrastructures](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/coginfra-film) (2025-05-10)
- [Existential Technologies](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/existentialtech) (2025-05-10)
- [For a General Theory of Simulations](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/theoryofsim) (2025-05-10)
- [After Alignment](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/afteralignment) (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)
- [A New Philosophy Of Planetary Computation](https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/noema-a-new-philosophy-of-planetary-computation) (2022-10-05)

_Glossary generated 2026-09-06._