Vast grids of marked stakes emerge into view as James Bridle walks the rugged wilds of Epirus in Greece, where an oil company intends to drill: the interface of AI with the depredation of the planet, the “tooth- and claw-marks of Artificial Intelligence, at the exact point where it meets the earth.” You might expect this to be the opening of an anti-technological screed, but in Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence, published last year, Bridle (who uses they/them pronouns) takes their inquiry in an unexpected direction. Appalled at the imminent destruction of our world and the “attenuation of the spiritual” in science’s reduction of the non-human, Bridle sees in our most recent technological advances the potential for re-conceiving world as intelligence, and coming to a new understanding not so much of, but with, what David Abrams calls “the more-than-human world.”
Bridle writes of a new Copernican trauma: “standing upon a ruined planet, not smart enough to save ourselves, and no longer by any stretch of the imagination the smartest living things around.” What if the meaning of AI, they ask, is not its (indubitable) threat to us, but “like the emergence of network theory, its purpose is to open our eyes and minds to the reality of intelligence as something doable in all kinds of fantastic ways, many of them beyond our own rational understanding?” Our survival, then, will depend on building a new relationship with the more-than-human world, “an intimation of our ultimate interdependence, and … an urgent call to humility and care.”
Neanderthal bone flutes, the behaviors of jackdaws, early computational systems, randomness in aleatory music, mycorrhizal networks, the springtime arrival of swallows in Greece and the impact of climate change on indigenous story-telling in Siberia, the ability of mimosas (“sensitive plants”) to modulate their responses, queer programming languages and non-binary AI, the intelligence of octopuses and slime molds, the democracy-in-practice of honey bee hives, and metal farms that mine ores from the earth using hyperaccumulator plants - these constitute a small sampling of the fascinating waypoints in Bridle’s mapping of this terrain.
They push and pull at our understanding of intelligence until it is stretched into a new shape and we see the world differently through it. Close scrutiny of the world with advancing technologies yields not a rigid map, but “a pattern of interference,” a “thicket of life.” Networks, whether digital or natural, function as incarnate intelligences, and we and our technologies form only a small part of the systems in which we participate - and so we travel full circle to a nearly indigenous vision of the world.
Occasionally abstruse but always exhilarating, Ways of Being is a provocation - and a remarkable exploration of the ways in which, with a slight shift in perspective, knowing the world and the world’s own knowing may be seen to be interleaved. The world, Bridle concludes, “is a computer made out of crabs, infinitely entangled at every level, and singing, full-throated, the song of its own becoming. The only way forward is together.”
Jared is an adult services librarian at the Howe Library in Hanover. He purchases a range of nonfiction for the library and conspires with a colleague to devise the library’s programming. When otherwise free, he’s usually in the mountains, swimming in local ponds and rivers, trying his hand at new cuisines, reading, or dreaming of walking the Scottish Highlands.