Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence

Yet, as we shall see, there are in fact many ways of doing intelligence, because intelligence is an active process, not just a mental capacity. By rethinking intelligence, and the forms in which it appears in other beings, we will begin to break down some of the barriers and false hierarchies that separate us from other species and the world. In do

When we speak, we take in the atmosphere and expel it again; we ingest the world and make it resonate. By speaking, we partake in the world, and the world partakes of us. This is true, also, of other forms of speech: the cry of birds, the scratching of crickets, the wind in the trees, the rumble of stone. Speech exists between bodies and beings; it

To my mind, what makes the MONIAC so special is that it literally puts the user’s hands on the controls of the economy, while continuing to insist upon the financial system’s fluidity and liveliness. It shows that the economy is both a force of nature and the outcome of deliberate, conscious decision-making. Like the Bay Model, the MONIAC gives us

Ecology is not merely the study of where we find ourselves, but of everything which surrounds us and allows us to live.

Concerned as we are with how to think and understand the life of beings which are radically different to our own, and how to rethink ourselves in the process, we might see undecidability not as a barrier to understanding, but as a sign, a hint, a truffle-scent, that something interesting, even useful, is nearby.

Our very survival depends upon our ability to make a new compact with the more-than-human world, one which views the intelligence, the innate being, of all things – animal, vegetable and machine – not as another indication of our own superiority, but as an intimation of our ultimate interdependence, and as an urgent call to humility and care.

It’s precisely this becoming-together of diverse cosmologies, legal structures and even technologies which has the most chance of generating new frameworks for justice, equality and ecological flourishing. Yet those of us who live in so-called Enlightenment culture and within histories of domination and cultural imperialism often lack a willingness

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

and their planthood, their subjecthood, their beinghood. It’s about allowing them to be themselves, while working with them to structure the world for the benefit of all of us. We must think not on the scale of laboratories and courtrooms, but on the scale of forests, mountain ranges, tundra, oceans and continents