Benjamin Bratton and Reza Negarestani in Conversation

Provenance

Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

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Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: stage-1 acceptance ruling — lane unknown approved for opus-only hosting; mp3 tier deferred pending a disk volume). Series: standalone. Source: audio original (.mp3).

Timestamped map

These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:00

  and we'll probably get it again anyway um so just to describe the format quickly first um so what will happen is that ben and razor will talk for the first hour and a half or so or maybe two hours um then we'll have a break then we will reconvene to have half an hour or so of questions um from the audience this will…

• 00:29:02

  GPT-3 is measured in order of magnitude smaller. Not only their ability to parse Winograd schema, but to respond to relatively complex. It responds to the prompts in ways that are more semantically, structurally complex than the prompts itself. Now, I'm not suggesting that the language model is conscious in the sense…

• 00:51:04

  You know, the first law of thermodynamics, energy cannot be created ex nihilo, nor can it be lost, accident. And we see it in Darwin, we see it in Robert Meyer, we see it in Helmholtz, and we see it in Freud. And I think today's discourse about a, it seems that it's a certain sort of unnecessary sentimental clash…

• 01:11:26

  But then also this attention to, say, astrobiology on the one hand, our discussion of animals and the minerals of machine intelligence as a kind of convergent vector. What this allows us to see is that the link between the range of possible conditions of substrate is quite diverse. Yes, it's a continuum. It's diverse…

• 01:30:05

  For example, the evolution of a cell, RNA and so on and so forth, right? And I think it's easy to take for granted. I think that we can do so in 2022. You can model cellular processes in ways just 20 years ago would have been science fiction. Absolutely, absolutely so. But my question here for you was that with regard…

• 01:48:22

  The concept of climate change and the concept that anthropogenic agency. On this scale was even possible, does not emerge until Bernanski and others in the, others in the early 20th century, and then really doesn't become a concept until the late 20th century. But the artificialization that was taking place long…

• 02:11:18

  Probably don't want to read my text. I'm almost done with that. It is very bad. Very critical. That's fine. No, no, no. The fact that the fact that they're actually that that so much of the discourse is actually this sorts of Western frameworks is is part of what we part of what we've identified throughout the whole…

• 02:35:47

  because that ends up pretty good and then it kind of never actually translates uh or transcript correctly uh iranian accent unfortunately it's a terrorist accent that's yeah that's always this issue i mean one of the things the only thing that i found is that the the literally the recording the better it does…