James Bridle

Artist, technologist, and philosopher James Bridle’s Ways of Being is a brilliant, searching exploration of different kinds of intelligence—plant, animal, human, artificial—and how they transform our understanding of humans’ place in the cosmos. What does it mean to be intelligent? Is it something unique to humans, or shared with other beings—beings of flesh, wood, stone, and silicon? The last few years have seen rapid advances in “artificial” intelligence. But as it approaches, it also gets weirder: rather than a friend or helpmate, AI increasingly appears as something stranger than we ever imagined, an alien invention that threatens to decenter and supplant us. At the same time, we’re only just becoming aware of the other intelligences which have been with us all along, even if we’ve failed to recognize or acknowledge them. These others—the animals, plants, and natural systems that surround us are slowly revealing their complexity, agency, and knowledge, just as the technologies we’ve built to sustain ourselves are threatening to cause their extinction, and ours. What can we learn from them, and how can we change ourselves, our technologies, our societies, and our politics, to live better and more equitably with one another and the non-human world? Artist and maverick thinker James Bridle drawn on biology and physics, computation, literature, art, and philosophy, to answer these unsettling questions. Startling and bold, Ways of Being explores the fascinating, strange and multitudinous forms of knowing, doing, and being which are becoming evident in the present, and which are essential for our survival. Includes illustrations

Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence

Ways of Being

Karolina

After all, the captains of digital industry, the beneficiaries of the vast wealth that technology generates, have the most to lose in being replaced by super-intelligent Al. Perhaps they fear artificial intelligence because it threatens to do to them what they have been doing to the rest of us for some time.

We tend to imagine AI as embodied in something like a robot, or a computer, but it can really be instantiated as anything. Imagine a system with clearly defined goals, sensors and effectors for reading and interacting with the world, the ability to recognize pleasure and pain as attractors and things to avoid, the resources to carry out its will, and the legal and social standing to see that its needs are catered for, even respected. That's a description of an AI - it's also a description of a modern corporation.

Intelligence is relational: it matters how and where you do it, what form your body gives it, and with whom it connects. Intelligence, then, is not something to be tested, but something to be recognized, in all the multiple forms that it takes.

This decentring, an admission that the human race is not the only game in town, does not correspond to any reduction of our world. Rather, as when we extend the virtue of intelligence to other beings, the addition of plant worlds to our own enriches both.

The very existence of other worlds, of numerous overlapping worlds in which many kinds of things and many ways of seeing and being are possible, should thrill us. Other worlds are not only possible, they are already present. The acknowledgement of multiple other worlds, the worlds of others, is key to disentangling ourselves from from our greatest social and technological deception, and re- entangling ourselves with a more meaningful and compassionate cosmology.

Fully recognizing that non-human plants, animals and others have their own worlds which are fundamentally different and unknowable to us is to begin to end human exceptionalism and human supremacism. Humans are not at the centre of the universe.

What we perceive as borders and conflicts the things which separate us - often turn out not to be artefacts of the exterior world, but immeasurable gaps in our own conceptions, abilities and tools of discernment. We think we are studying the world - but in reality we are merely making evident the limits of our own thinking, which are embodied in our logbooks and measuring instruments. The truth is always stranger, more lively and more expansive than anything we can compute.

In information technology, as in evolutionary biology, it seems that the more we try to control and categorize the world- to stuff everything into little boxes and lines in databases - the more of life spills out.

To make a model is to abstract and represent: it is an act of distancing from the world. But the world is already here, it's right in front of us. We are suspended within and soaked in it: we are inseparable from it.

We treat the world as something to be computed, and thus amenable to comnputation. We think of it as something which can be broken down into discrete points of data and fed into machines. We believe the machine will give us concrete answers about the world which we can act on, and confers upon those answers a logical irrefutability and a moral impunity. 

From this error flows all kinds of violence: the violence which reduces the beauty of the world to numbers, and the consequent violence which tries to force the world to conform to that representation, which erases, degrades, tortures and kills those things and beings which do not fit within the assumed system of representation.

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