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Ways of Being

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

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Ways of Being

By: James Bridle
Narrated by: James Bridle
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

What does it mean to be intelligent? Is it something unique to humans - or do we share it with other beings?

Recent years have seen rapid advances in 'artificial' intelligence, which increasingly appears to be something stranger than we ever imagined. At the same time, we are becoming more aware of the other intelligences which have been with us all along, unrecognized. These other beings are the animals, plants, and natural systems that surround us, and are slowly revealing their complexity and knowledge - just as the new technologies we've built are threatening to cause their extinction, and ours.

In Ways of Being, writer and artist James Bridle considers the fascinating, uncanny and multiple ways of existing on earth. What can we learn from these other forms of intelligence and personhood, and how can we change our societies to live more equitably with one another and the non-human world? From Greek oracles to octopuses, forests to satellites, Bridle tells a radical new story about ecology, technology and intelligence. We must, they argue, expand our definition of these terms to build a meaningful and free relationship with the non-human, one based on solidarity and cognitive diversity. We have so much to learn, and many worlds to gain.

© James Bridle 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

 Biological Sciences Computer Science Consciousness & Thought Epistemology Machine Theory & Artificial Intelligence Philosophy Psychology Psychology & Mental Health Science Technology Data Science Machine Learning

Critic reviews

Bridle's writing weaves cultural threads that aren't usually seen together, and the resulting tapestry is iridescently original, deeply disorientating and yet somehow radically hopeful. The only futures that are viable will probably feel like that. This is a pretty amazing book, worth reading and rereading. (Brian Eno)
James Bridle is an artist who is fascinated by technology - creating a homemade self-driving car to understand how AIs "think", for example - and I loved their book, Ways of Being, which looks at artificial and animal intelligence, and how those challenge our assumptions about the world. Come for the slime mould replicating the Tokyo subway system, stay for the non-binary computer that used water to model the British economy. (Helen Lewis)
Heady and often astonishing ... the scope of Bridle's curiosity and comprehension is immense ... there is something hopeful and even heartening in their faith that our current disastrous course might be shifted not only by new policies and technologies but also - and more fundamentally - by the power of new ideas. (Stefan Merrill Block)
If you plan on reading James Bridle's Ways of Being - and I cannot recommend highly enough that you do - you might consider forming a support group first. The ideas in this book are so big, so fascinating and yes, so foreign, you are going to need people to talk to about them ... Bridle has created a new way of thinking about our world, about being ... read this important book. Read it twice. Talk about it. Tell everyone you know. (Brenna Maloney)
It was so interesting that I luxuriated in every word. The conversation unfolding in these pages is fundamentally important and I would recommend it to absolutely everyone who wants to really think and reimagine a future that remains ours to make. I was left with a feeling that James Bridle hasn't so much written a book, as a manifesto for a new Green Enlightenment ... it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. (Sir Tim Smit)
In making clear the patience, imagination and humility required to better know and protect other forms of intelligence on Earth, Bridle has made an admirable contribution to the dawning interspecies age.
Bridle is a clear, artful writer and a sweeping thinker ... [A] hopeful book, almost an antidote. It imagines technology not as something separate and menacing, but as part of a grand unfolding - an 'efflorescence', to use Bridle's word - along an evolutionary continuum of human and 'more-than-human' ways of being in the world. (Peter Christie)
All stars
Most relevant
Great, one can only hope more people begin to understand human's place within the biosphere

Thought provoking

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I was going to drop a star due to this largely being a synthesis of other recent books on the nature of intelligence, many of which I've read (or have on the to read list). But it's so enthusiastically, engagingly, and accessibly done, I think it deserves a rare five stars.

Of course, the whole thing feels overly optimistic in the era of Trump 2: "Technological processes like artificial intelligence won't build a better world by themselves, just as they won't tell us anything useful about general intelligence. What they can do is lay bare real workings of the moral and more than human landscape we find ourselves in and to inspire us to create better worlds together."

An excellent synthesis of recent thinking on intelligence

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What a wonderful, expertly researched, playfully written generous and more-than-humane book. Urgent. Patient. Illuminating. Read it.

Wonderful

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This is one of the most exciting, inspiring and interesting books I've ever read. I couldn't stop telling people all the amazing ideas and facts I was learning as I read! It's so wide ranging in its subject matter, from corporate AI to plant learning to animal politics to ancient Greece to satellite tracking, but it all comes together as a cohesive whole by the end. I love it when people are able to use science and philosophy in novel ways to suggest how a world we can all thrive in might look, rather than getting stuck in the same old depressing limited alienating exclusionary profit focused mindsets that dominate mainstream politics.

Inspiring, informative, mindset-shifting

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Immensely educational, enriching, inspiring and entertaining while transitioning so seamlessly between technology and biology, and between scales, projects, philosophies with an in-depth yet highly accessible scientific grounding. I enjoyed every bit of this book as well as the narration and would recommend it to anyone who is interested in understanding the highly complex and interconnected relationships at play in our world in a time where it is critical to use the planet's collective intelligence and capability to emerge out of crisis and binary thinking.

This book deserves an award

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