What does ‘the world as computation’ mean?

Definition of computational power: It is the ability to understand the processes and rules by which nature operates and to use that power to shape the future. It is, necessarily, bound up with the capacity to assert purpose and intent.

In this series, computation names more than digital technology or artificial intelligence. It refers to the growing capacity to gather, model, and steer processes that once unfolded on their own—evolution, climate, aging, reproduction. As our computational control accelerates, we reshape how time, responsibility, and ethical life are experienced.

The World as Computation is for readers interested in how computational power reshapes ethical judgment, historical trajectories, and lived experience.

We are living in a new phase of the Enlightenment

Conversations at the front lines of digital technology, especially AI, inevitably wander through morality, economics, religion, evolution, culture, and consciousness. What unites these domains is not agreement but absorption: they increasingly appear as problems already within the scope of computational power, or soon to be.

This absorptive capacity is not incidental. It is a defining feature of our time. As Michel Serres once said, ‘We are steering things that we didn’t used to steer.’ This opens a crucial moral question for our time: Can we master our capacity to steer?

Computation as Infrastructure

In 1994, I described an earlier version of this dynamic as Infrastructures of Enlightenment, tracing how roads, print, and information networks accelerated the capacity to gather the world into infrastructure. Today, digital systems have become a far more pervasive infrastructure, absorbing and transforming nearly every aspect of life at unprecedented speed and scale. This new Enlightenment is not defined by reason alone, but by calculation’s capacity to reformat the world—and its tempo now shapes our experience of time itself. The challenge is not simply to slow down, but to learn how to live, think, and govern within an Enlightenment that unfolds faster than any Homo sapiens has every experienced.

A Crisis of Fate

Our computational power is the latest installment of our human capacity to gain more control over fate—the things that we’ve often ascribed to the will of gods or the whims of nature. Many of the things that appear as out of control today are of our own making—computational power, climate change, population growth, global migrations, wealth inequalities, teetering democracies that only 30 years ago we thought represented The End of History.

The essays gathered here are not arguments against computation, nor celebrations of it. They are attempts to think from within a world that has become newly steerable and newly uncertain. Fate has not disappeared; it is the byproduct of our control and thus something we navigate. Ethical life becomes the practices we learn in motion, under changing conditions.

Key Questions Explored Here

What changes when computation becomes pervasive?

How does fate change when it becomes a byproduct of our computational mastery?

Why does ethical judgment lag behind coordination?