Computocene: Notes from an Age of Observation

2025-05-27

AI Summary

This paper addresses the fundamental shift in computing from instrumental execution to cognitive participation, challenging dominant techno-positivist conceptions that reduce computation to automation or intelligence. Method: Rejecting empirical-technical approaches, it employs philosophical inquiry, phenomenological analysis, and historiographical reflection on science to systematically reconstruct computation as a constitutive “mode of attention”—encompassing information filtering, problem reframing, and inquiry guidance—within scientific practice. Contribution/Results: It introduces the concept of the “Computocene” to recast computation as a world-tuning epistemic practice that conditions the very possibility of knowledge production. The study establishes computation as a novel epistemic instrument, thereby enabling a critical reexamination of the foundations of knowledge generation in the AI era and providing a theoretical framework for reconceptualizing human–machine cognitive collaboration.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Other Foundations of Human Computation & AI
• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: AI & Epistemology
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Affective Computing

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Research challenges in human and human-AI computation
• Social Networks and Social Media: Computational social science
• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions

Abstract

This piece plays with the idea of the Computocene: an era defined not merely by the ubiquity of computers, but by their deepening role in how we observe, interpret, and make sense of the world. Rather than emphasizing automation, speed, scale, or intelligence, computation is reframed as a mode of attention: filtering information, guiding inquiry, reframing questions, and shaping the very conditions under which knowledge emerges. I invite the reader to consider computers not simply as tools of calculation, but as epistemic instruments that participate in the formation of knowledge. This perspective reconfigures not only scientific practice but the epistemological foundations of understanding itself. The Computocene thus names a shift: from computation as calculation to computation as a form of attunement to the world. It is a speculative essay, offered without technical formality, and intended for a general, curious readership.

Problem

• Exploring the Computocene era's impact on observation and interpretation
• Reframing computation as a mode of attention and knowledge formation
• Shifting from computation as calculation to world attunement

Innovation

• Computers as epistemic instruments for knowledge
• Computation redefined as mode of attention
• Shift from calculation to world attunement