AI is changing the way people relate to other beings
Ways of Being. By James Bridle. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 384 pages; $30.
Allen Lane; £20 Interspecies was once a technical term used in science to describe how one species got along with another. Now it is a word of more consequence: it evokes the new connections between humans and non-humans that are being made possible by technology. Whether it is satellite footage tracking geese at continental scale, or a smartphone video of squirrels in a park, people are seeing the 8.7m other species on the planet in new lights.
In “Ways of Being", James Bridle, a British artist and technology writer, explores what this means for understanding the many non-human intelligences on Earth. Mr Bridle makes clear that three kinds of minds are now interacting: human, non-human and machine. Using artificial intelligence (ai), machines will in future have the capability to interpose themselves as translators between human and other biological life forms.
The strength of machine intelligence is its rapidity, repetition and accuracy over time. The author spots an immediate hitch: ibm, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook and other big technology firms are, he alleges, “the number one driver of climate change" and so of “global extinction". That is overcooking it, given that the same companies build climate solutions and disseminate knowledge, and that other industries are much dirtier.
What is true is that profit is the main motive for advances in ai; as yet nature does not get much of a look in, and non-human intelligences go unexplored outside zoology departments. Computing is as focused on humans as ever, even as climate change and biodiversity-loss suggest it should devote much greater attention to other species. The first step towards an
. Read more on livemint.com
