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Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence
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About This Book
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
Reviews
"Catastrophe is coming, and we might only save ourselves if we can find new ways to look and to listen."
"The author scorns captains of digital industry such as Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Shane Legg, who warn that AI presents humanity's 'biggest existential threat.' But the book's answer to adversarial AI appears to be the hope that the intelligences we construct will join the envisioned planetary web of more-than-human solidarity."
"A human-centric notion of intelligence takes the backseat in this fascinating survey from artist Bridle...Intelligence, he writes, 'is not something to be tested, but something to be recognized, in all the multiple forms that it takes'...To that end, he notes that plants have the 'ability..."
"Tell everyone you know."
"Bridle argues, is showing more appreciation for other forms of intelligence...To some extent, this is already happening, starting with cephalopods...Through films and other initiatives many people now know that octopuses have an advanced and strange intelligence...Human beings' last common ancestor with the octopus lived 600m years ago, compared with 16m years for the chimpanzee...Yet the octopus eye resembles the human kind."
"Bridle, an artist and philosopher with a keen interest in the impact of technology on contemporary life, explores the ways in which a broader and more accurate understanding of rationality must force us to reevaluate assumptions about the preeminence of humanity...Bridle champions a philosophical reorientation that would dislodge anthropocentrism in favor of an ethic of relationality, which encourages a responsibility to the teeming subjectivity of our environments...This is an accessible but also technically precise book, and it makes a remarkably compelling case for the universality of reason, the benefits to be reaped by acknowledging it, and the urgent need to do so given the reality of looming ecological collapse...Among the most revelatory of the chapters are those in which Bridle describes the intelligence of animals such as octopuses, baboons, and bees—and, even more startlingly, of various plants, whose sophisticated communication networks and mnemonic abilities have just begun to be fathomed by scientists...A provocative, profoundly insightful consideration of forms of reason and their relevance to our shared future."
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