Ways of being animals, plants, machines : the search for a planetary intelligence

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 helpm...

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Main Author: Bridle, James (Author)
Format: Books Print Book
Language: English
Published: New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022.
Edition: First American edition.
Subjects:
Summary: 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?
Item Description: "Originally published in 2022 by Allen Lane, Great Britain, as Ways of being : beyond human intelligence."
Physical Description: xiv, 364 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Bibliography: Includes bibliographical references (pages 313-352) and index.
ISBN: 9780374601119
0374601119
Author Notes: James Bridle is a writer and an artist. Their writing on art, politics, culture, and technology has appeared in magazines and newspapers including The Guardian , The Observer , Wired , The Atlantic , the New Statesman , frieze , Domus , and ICON . New Dark Age , their book about technology, knowledge, and the end of the future, was published in 2018 and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. In 2019, they wrote and presented New Ways of Seeing, a four-part series for BBC Radio 4. Their artworks have been commissioned by galleries and institutions including the V&A, Whitechapel Gallery, the Barbican, Hayward Gallery, and the Serpentine and have been exhibited worldwide and on the internet.