Platform Automation

Stephanie Sherman's name for the loop by which platforms and automation produce each other: platforms standardize, standards make things programmable, programmability permits automation, and automation lays down the next platform. Her Planetary chapter states it as a chiasmus: automation of platforms, platformation of automation. The idea comes from Fuller: automation is an evolutionary dynamic in which a decision once open to deliberation settles into a predetermined context enabling further formations, so cells and planets automate as much as assembly lines; Ford's automotive complex is AUTO's case. Because entrenched platforms cascade path-dependently (Momentum over Motive; the Autocene), Sherman argues AI changes the mode: delegation becomes learning, not programming, so design should move from agents to environments and control to coordination. The chapter calls the fixation on governing AI an irony and asks for AI as a tool for governance, an uneasy fit with Recursive Governance, where governing AI itself requires AI.