The Ethics of Listening to Whales – A Conversation with James Bridle, Rebecca Giggs, César Rodríguez-Garavito and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

The sound of sudden inhalation followed, like water being sucked down a drain. I caught a glimpse of a pinkish gray hump before it vanished beneath the murky surface. “Boto,” said Soldado as he tossed his cigarette butt over the railing. The legendary Amazonian river dolphin. It surfaced again, and this time the animal sprayed water ten feet into t

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In some part of their brain, even drowsing, they will comprehend motion. Through the seals in the van doors they will detect traces of passing substances: clays, flints, grasslands, under diesel and bitumen, exhaust fumes. And humans nearby – perspiration, hormones. They are intelligent analysts. In those in captivity, she’s witnessed incredible re

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If the context of our relationships really matters so much, then it will also matter in our relationships with machine intelligence. Perhaps we should be thinking more carefully about the ecosystem in which we are raising AI, particularly the kind of aggressive, domineering and destructive forms which seem to be proliferating. That these systems ar

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Perhaps if more people were aware of the First Wave and Second Wave extinctions, they’d be less nonchalant about the Third Wave they are part of. If we knew how many species we’ve already eradicated, we might be more motivated to protect those that still survive. This is especially relevant to the large animals of the oceans. Unlike their terrestri

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‘A central question was: what if we were to really honour and acknowledge the fact that we are animals?’ he explains. ‘How would we think, or speak, about even the most ordinary, taken-for-granted aspect of the world, like shadows, or gravity, or houses, or the weather? So much of the language we’ve inherited is laden with otherworldly assumptions.... See more