Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence

This is the full realization of Turing’s oracle machine, that mysteriously powerful device which, whatever it is, ‘cannot be a machine’. Once again, we come to the only conclusion available: the oracle is the world.

Technological determinism is the line of thinking which decrees that technological progress is unstoppable.

around us when we consider how we relate to everything else. Being itself is relational: a matter of interrelationships.

Intelligence is one among many ways of being in the world: it is an interface to it; it makes the world manifest.

As scientific practice has matured, we’ve come to understand the value of interpretation, situated knowledge and trained judgement; but this fallacy has been perpetuated by our technologies, which flatten and lump together the myriad different expressions of the world.

Models of progression, advancement, linearity and individuality – models, in short, of hierarchy and dominance – collapse under the weight of actual diversity. Life is soupy, mixed up and tumultuous. Muddying the waters is precisely the point, because it’s from such nutritious streams that life grows. The individual, under the microscope or under t

Our machines should be non-binary, decentralized and unknowing.

Nonetheless, such programmes can all too easily continue to ignore or erase actual reality – with devastating consequences – if they perceive themselves in the same way that we, their creators, have always seen ourselves: as experts, authorities and masters.

Once again, in imagining better ways of living with non-humans, computational or biological, we must be attentive to their own ways of speaking and making meaning, and not simply insist that they learn to speak, and think, and behave, in the ways that we do.

The lens required now is not a microscope, but a macroscope: a device for seeing at a far vaster scale – both in space and time – than we are used to.