Planetary Experiments: Notes to a Theory of Technospheric Governance by Prof. Orit Halpern on March 12th, 2026

This talk develops the concept of “technospheric governance” to analyze how contemporary AI platforms for climate modeling, military operations, and logistics constitute an emerging episteme with significant implications for geo- politics. Drawing on case studies of digital twinning initiatives—including the European Union’s Destination Earth, NVIDIA’s Earth-2, Alibaba’s City Brain and Huawei’s Global City Intelligent Twins, and Palantir’s enterprise platforms—the talk traces three interrelated transformations. First, an epistemic shift from causal, explanatory models to non-causal “generative” inference reorganizes what counts as knowledge and who qualifies as expert. Second, a temporal displacement inverts the traditional sequence of deliberation and deployment, with technologies assessed through continuous “learning” rather than prior democratic or scientific debate. Third, planetary-scale experimentation produces not unified global governance but fragmented data spaces serving competing political-economic blocs. By situating these developments within a genealogy extending from Cold War systems modeling to contemporary AI infrastructures, the talk argues that experimentation itself has become infrastructuralized, demanding urgent attention to the politics of technological testing.

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