---
title: "Existential Technologies"
description: "Bogna Konior reads Stanisław Lem's *Summa Technologiae* (1964) to propose a category she calls existential technologies: technologies that alter the evolutionary trajectory of the species over long spans of time, and so determine not only whether we survive but \"as what\" we survive."
type: "reading-notes"
authors:
  - "Bogna Konior"
published: "2025-05-10"
original_url: "https://existentialtech.antikythera.org/"
doi: "10.1162/ANTI.5CZV"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/existentialtech"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/work/journal/existentialtech"
last_updated: "2026-08-23"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Existential Technologies

> Independent, unofficial reading notes from Antikythera Wiki (https://antikythera.wiki). Written with AI from the published text, with citations; not by the work's author and not affiliated with Antikythera (https://antikythera.org). Read the original at the link below.

- **Authors:** Bogna Konior
- **Published:** 2025-05-10
- **Kind:** Journal · Journal article
- **DOI:** https://doi.org/10.1162/ANTI.5CZV
- **Original:** https://existentialtech.antikythera.org/
- **Length:** 9.2k words
- **This page:** https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/existentialtech
- **Notes generated:** 2026-08-23

## Summary

[Bogna Konior](https://antikythera.wiki/people/bogna-konior) reads Stanisław Lem's *Summa Technologiae* (1964) to propose a category she calls existential technologies: technologies that alter the evolutionary trajectory of the species over long spans of time, and so determine not only whether we survive but "as what" we survive. These are distinguished from functional technologies, which are used by people on other people to help or harm and whose moral valence is legible. Existential technologies are morally opaque, because the changes they produce may dissolve the very ideals by which we would judge them. Konior builds the concept from a remark Lem makes in passing, that humans have not yet "grown in stature," only their capacity for good and evil has expanded, and fills it in with two sub-kinds drawn from the book: gnostic technologies, which automate knowledge production by detaching it from human comprehension, and anthropoforming technologies, which remake bodies, reproduction, and identity. The essay is also an argument against long-termism's confidence that the deep future is legible and steerable, and a case that the Eastern European experience of history as an outside force is a resource for thinking about technology as one.

## The argument

Konior opens with the problem of futurology as Lem posed it. Absent a theory of technological change, people project the present forward; Lem's caveman expects the future to hold bigger and better-hewn stones. *Summa Technologiae* is valuable because it describes tendencies rather than guessing at tools, and because it frames technology within two parallel evolutions, natural and technological, that overlap and diverge. Konior stresses that the book is also a morality tale with an ambiguous stance: Lem refused humanist reassurances but held that technological evolution, unlike biological evolution, is not amoral.

The first move separates the amorality of evolution from the accountability of human technological action. Lem admired the "blind designer" of the cell because it understands nothing and builds everything. But a person who learns how evolution constructs things cannot pretend to be merely gathering knowledge; the burden evolution never carried falls on whoever acquires the power to decide. The question is then whether technology is subordinate to human moral action or to evolution's unthinking designs.

Konior sets William MacAskill's *What We Owe the Future* as the foil. Long-termism pictures the world 500 million years out, personifies everyone in it, and assumes that future ethics and outcomes are legible and that progress should by default improve the world. Against this she draws three counterclaims from Lem. There is no ahistorical morality: we resemble the Sumerians somewhat, but the Levalloisians would terrify us, and beings half a billion years away will not share our commitments. Human agency is not divine: civilization "does not function as it wishes, but as it must," and Weber's Protestant ascetics show how a moral practice against materialism launched consumer capitalism. And we do not know what we are doing: Lem quotes Russell on mathematics and concludes that a person "almost never knows what they are actually doing."

From this Konior derives the distinction that organizes the essay. *Summa* does not reject utilitarian concerns, but treats shelter, security, and planetary homeostasis as "the maturity exam" of a young civilization, its beginning rather than its end. The stranger passage is Lem's aside that a civilization might one day regulate the sun's interior, offered "to open up the possibility of contrast": humans have not yet grown in stature, only their capacity for good and evil has expanded. Konior lingers on the Polish verb, which means growing noble rather than powerful, and asks how the technologies that make us grow could fail to be the ones we use to do good or harm. Her answer names the morally opaque but noble pursuit: functional technologies transparently extend our capacity to help and harm one another; existential technologies alter what we are, and whether the result can still be called "us." Language is her paradigm case.

Section three supplies two sub-kinds. Gnostic technologies concern epistemology. Lem feared that science would drown in its own information, splinter into self-confirming communities, and stagnate, and he proposed that progress might require decoupling knowledge from human comprehension through a "gnostic machine" that hands back theories no human can read. Konior argues that non-interpretable deep learning already fits the description: AlphaFold, AI in SETI data analysis, and machine decoding of animal communication produce knowledge without making it intelligible. Anthropoforming technologies concern ontology. Lem's cloning, gradual species redesign, machine matchmaking, and xenowombs were empty categories in the 1960s; algorithmic dating, chatbot romance, in vitro gametogenesis, griefbots, voice clones, and CRISPR mean they no longer are. Both sub-kinds shift the site of significance away from human needs toward what counts as knowledge and what counts as existence.

The final section locates the view historically. *Summa* broke with Soviet Prometheanism, for which humans captain history toward progress. Konior argues that intellectuals who lived through occupation grasped technology as an invasion from without and, unlike many postcolonial thinkers, did not reject it but understood it as an inhuman vector beyond the ideologies they lived under. The essay ends by offering existential technologies as an "antidote" to long-termism's legible future: leaning into fatalism while continuing to push toward alienation, artificiality, and whatever cannot be domesticated by ideologies that have repeatedly failed.

## Section by section

### Introduction

The untitled opening establishes *Summa* as a book about technology's tendencies rather than its gadgets. Konior cites Peter Butko's judgment that it anticipated *The Selfish Gene* and *Gödel, Escher, Bach*, and Lem's own description of it as "a dreadful text full of showing off." She fixes the stakes: humans are uniquely fertile soil for technological take-off, but it is unclear whether they conduct the process or are its instruments.

### 1 Two Evolutions and the Amorality of Deep Time

Konior lists Lem's forecast tendencies: intellectronics (engineering intelligence), phantomatics (simulated worlds), cerebromatics (manipulating thought and character), teletaxy and phantoplication (cloning and consciousness-splitting), automated knowledge production, synthetic language, biotechnology, and technologies of love and reproduction. She then turns to Lem's obstacles to prognosis: discoveries arrive by accident, tendencies have unknown lifespans, and each invention exceeds its starting conditions. Konior adds that technology still lacks its *Origin of Species*, a theory of why some technical forms emerge and persist.

The section's central contrast is between evolution's blind efficiency and human accountability. *Summa*'s closing paragraph on nature's "perfectly atheoretical" language, which "creates philosophers, while ours can only create philosophies," sits beside Lem's insistence that one "cannot simultaneously make discoveries and avoid taking responsibility for their consequences." MacAskill enters here, and Konior's rebuttal runs through the historicity of morality, the non-divine character of human agency, the Weber example, and Lem's remark that mathematicians at least know they do not know what they are doing. A footnote qualifies the "blind watchmaker" image: contemporary evolutionary theory emphasizes convergence, so evolution is not directionless, merely without teleology or moral orientation.

### 2 A Morally Opaque Pursuit: Functional and Existential Technologies

This is where the essay's concept is built. Konior first shows that Lem retained utilitarian concerns (cryptocracy, or over-deferring to machines; injustice; consumerism; bias) but ranked them as preliminary. The passages quoted have Lem declaring humanity as helpless before earthquakes and meteor impacts as it was in the last glacial period, and asking whether an advanced civilization is defined "not by maximum energy [expenditure], but by optimal regulation." She then isolates the passage on regulating the sun and the sentence about humans not yet having grown in stature. Her reading of *wyogromniał* as growth in nobility rather than power is the hinge: it implies that existential growth and the expansion of good-and-evil capacity are distinct axes. The definitions follow. Functional technologies (medication, weapons, media, monitoring, transport, construction, energy) make civilization possible and ground the others. Existential technologies concern "civilization as we do not yet know it" and determine as what we survive. The section closes by noting that the classification may be visible only in retrospect, that one kind may be nested in the other, and that mundane technologies "for us" may, over millennia, alienate us from whatever humanity used to mean.

### 3 Existential Tools for Minds and Bodies

Konior concedes that reading *Summa* through her framework is selective, then foregrounds the two areas where the alienating potential is greatest. On epistemology, she recounts Lem's image of knowledge as a temple whose remaining riddles might, once solved, require demolishing half the building, and his fear of an "embarrassment of riches" that would have to be regulated to preserve civilization's freedom for strategic maneuver. The two gnostic-machine passages are quoted: a theory returned as a system of equations humans cannot use, and a machine that opens its user's eyes to problems never suspected, prompting Lem's question of who holds agency. Konior names these gnostic technologies and claims that black-boxed deep learning already instantiates them; a footnote concedes that whether AlphaFold "knows" anything depends on whether knowledge is confined to human cognition or distributed across assemblages. She adds that Lem also imagined machine gnosis for philosophy and metaphysics, simulating worlds built from the propositions of particular philosophies, and that no such technology yet exists.

On ontology, the term anthropoforming is borrowed from [Helen Hester](https://antikythera.wiki/people/helen-hester) by analogy with terraforming: altering our bodies rather than the environment, with pregnancy offered as a natural example. Lem's cases are cloning and its "existential relativity," a next model of Homo sapiens introduced gradually over centuries, machine matchmakers, xenowombs, and centuries-old preserved sperm. Konior quotes Lem's image from Polyphemus's cave, in which "it is Nobody who approaches us—but this time, for our own good," to mark the outsourcing of intimate processes to regulators without interiority. Her present-day examples are algorithmic matchmaking, chatbot relationships, IVG, digital replicas of the dead, voice clones, and deepfaked sex work; the barrier, she argues, is social rather than scientific. The section ends by stating what the two sub-kinds share: they displace human cognition as the site of epistemic authority and reframe selfhood as artificial and contingent.

### 4 Seeing the Future, Eastward

The last section is partly intellectual history and partly a claim about where insight comes from. *Summa* deprioritized human sensemaking in a context where Soviet science fiction and state Marxism cast humans as captains of history; Konior treats that teleology as "a convenient delusion befitting an ideologue." Her stronger claim is that people living through historical turbulence notice patterns that are not culturally relative but temporarily inaccessible to others; those "on the backswing of the pendulum" are not behind but elsewhere on the path.

The biographical material supports this. Conversations with Shklovsky and Kapitsa in Moscow and the Khrushchev Thaw's rehabilitation of cybernetics made *Summa* possible; Wiener's rejection of evolution as progress toward higher forms matched what Lem found in biology. The Party preferred his socialist-realist early work and censored *Solaris* as mystical and nihilist. Letters on writing under paper rationing, "blackmailing state officials" and saving scraps from commissioned morality essays, show the conditions under which his views formed. Konior quotes *His Master's Voice* on science as "the transcendence of experience" that crosses the barriers philosophy declares final. The Lviv childhood, successive occupations, the Holocaust, and Snyder's "Bloodlands" frame Lem's pessimism. Konior then generalizes: territories modernized under occupation experienced technology as an outside logic, and Eastern European intellectuals largely understood it as inhuman and therefore beyond the cruelties and ideologies they lived under. The closing paragraph treats existential technologies as a language for technology's detachment from human cognition and morality, and for a history that moves forward and backward at once.

## Key concepts

- **Existential technologies** — Technologies that alter the evolutionary trajectory of the species over long timescales, determining as what we survive rather than merely whether. They are morally opaque because they may abolish the ideals by which they would be judged; language is the paradigm case. [Existential Technologies](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/existential-technologies)
- **Functional technologies** — Technologies used by people on other people to help or harm: weapons, medicine, media, transport, energy. They transparently expand the capacity for good and evil and are the precondition for civilization and for other technologies. Konior's contrast differs from Bratton's instrumental-versus-existential pairing. [Functional vs. Instrumental Technologies](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/functional-vs-instrumental-technologies)
- **Gnostic technologies** — Lem's term, adopted by Konior, for technologies that automate science by detaching knowledge production from human comprehension. Non-interpretable deep learning such as AlphaFold is offered as an existing instance. [Gnostic Technologies](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/gnostic-technologies)
- **Anthropoforming technologies** — Borrowed from [Helen Hester](https://antikythera.wiki/people/helen-hester) on analogy with terraforming: technologies that remake bodies, reproduction, cognition, and identity rather than the environment. Cloning, IVG, algorithmic matchmaking, and gene editing are the examples. [Anthropoforming Technologies](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/anthropoforming-technologies)
- **Value drift** — The pattern by which moral practice produces outcomes contrary to its intent over time, illustrated by Weber's Protestant ascetics enabling consumer capitalism. Konior treats it as a regularity often accelerated by technology, not a curiosity.
- **"Man has not yet grown"** — Konior's rendering of Lem's *człowiek nie wyogromniał*, growth in stature or nobility as distinct from growth in power. The essay's concept is built from this distinction.

## Connections

- [Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/spoc) also credits Lem's *Summa* with the distinction between instrumental and existential technologies, but Bratton's version is different: existential technologies there are those that transform how we understand the world (telescopes, microscopes, computation). That roughly corresponds to Konior's gnostic sub-kind, and her anthropoforming category has no counterpart. Both attribute the idea to Lem; Konior is explicit that she is elaborating a passing remark. The same Bratton usage recurs in [For a General Theory of Simulations](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/theoryofsim) and [After Alignment](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/afteralignment).
- [What Is Intelligence?](https://antikythera.wiki/work/book/what-is-intelligence) shares the essay's hostility to long-termism but on different grounds: Agüera y Arcas attacks its arithmetic of future lives and its growth-maximizing picture of intelligence, whereas Konior attacks the legibility of future ethics. The two arguments are compatible but do not cite each other.
- [Planetary Sapience & Planetary Stupidity: a Bildungsroman for the Baby Noosphere](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/babynoosphere) draws a different Lem, the *New Cosmogony* of mature civilizations whose tools are the laws of nature. Read together, Moynihan's Lem and Konior's Lem both describe technology converging with nature beyond human legibility, though Moynihan's register is hopeful and Konior's is fatalist.
- [Latent Spacecraft](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/latentspacecraft) reproduces Lem's GOLEM diagram of a superintelligent computer taking over linguistic evolution, the gnostic machine applied to the technology Konior calls the paradigm existential one.
- [The Long L](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/longl) extends the time horizon to technosignatures and "assisted reproduction" of the technosphere, the nearest neighbor to anthropoforming at planetary scale; Likavčan's substrate-agnostic framing agrees with Konior's expectation that what survives may not be "us."
- [Modes of Cognition](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/modesofcognition) develops the Hayles position that Konior's footnote invokes to defend calling AlphaFold an epistemic agent: cognition distributed across assemblages rather than confined to conscious humans.
- [Traversing the Uncanny Ridge](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/coginfra/traversing-the-uncanny-ridge) and the rest of [Cognitive Infrastructures](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/coginfra) argue for productive disalignment between human and machine systems, a design-level version of Konior's injunction to push toward the alienating and inhuman rather than domesticate technology to present values.
- [How to Think Unlike Humans?](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/unlikehumans), published in the same issue, reaches a similar conclusion from fiction: [Chen Qiufan](https://antikythera.wiki/people/chen-qiufan) also asks readers to surrender part of themselves to become "more alien," though his optimism about symbiosis sits uneasily with Konior's fatalism.


## Terms used

- [Anthropoforming Technologies](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/anthropoforming-technologies)
- [Existential Technologies](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/existential-technologies)
- [Functional vs. Instrumental Technologies](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/functional-vs-instrumental-technologies)
- [Gnostic Technologies](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/gnostic-technologies)
- [Lem's Decoupling](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/lem-s-decoupling)
- [Shallow Eternity vs. Deep Time](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/shallow-eternity-vs-deep-time)
- [Societal Time Literacy](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/societal-time-literacy)
- [Temporal Orientation](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/temporal-orientation)

## Related works

- [Latent Spacecraft](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/latentspacecraft)
- [Substrates Unbound](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/substrates)
- [Hemispherical Stacks](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/hemstacks)
- [The History of Now](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/historyofnow)