AI is changing the way people relate to other beings

livemint.com:

Ways of Being. By James Bridle. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 384 pages; $30.

Allen Lane; £20 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 interspecies future, Mr Bridle argues, is showing more appreciation for other forms of intelligence (the “ways of being" of his title). To some extent, this is already happening, starting with cephalopods.

Through films and other initiatives many people now know that octopuses have an advanced and strange intelligence. Human beings’ last common ancestor with the octopus lived 600m years ago, compared with 16m years for the chimpanzee. Yet the octopus eye resembles the human kind.