Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence is a nuanced book filled with insights about how artificial intelligence can be understood in relation to what author James Bridle refers to as the more than human world. Throughout the book, I’m impressed at the Bridle’s ability to use concrete examples to show how technology increases our ability to understand nature and nature increases our ability to understand technology.

In semantic terms, we often describe nature in reference to technology – the universe is like a clock, the mind is like a computer, DNA is like code, the heart is like a pump or an engine – and understood technology by comparing it to nature – the internet is like a web and our data is stored in the cloud. While we may be tempted to view technology and nature as opposites, these analogies suggest that each seems to give us tools to understand the other.

Bridle makes this point more concrete by pointing out that if it hadn’t been for the internet, we wouldn’t have had the proper analogy to understand what has come to be known as the “Wood Wide Web.” It’s because we built a certain mental model – the concept of how networks operate – that we were able to conceptualize how trees communicate with one another through fungus underground.

Bridle’s description of networks and forests is just a small part of his argument for thinking through what he calls the “ecology of technology.” Throughout Ways of Being, Bridle points to ways that humans, nature, and technology are entangled together. Bridle argues that an “ecology of technology” can help us recapture a sense of wonder and enchantment toward the world.

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

In Bridle’s definition, intelligence is something that can be a quality of animals or machines – it is a way of being in the world.

If all intelligence is ecological – that is, entangled, relational, and of the world – then artificial intelligence provides a very real way for us to come to terms with all the other intelligences which populate and manifest through the planet.

This relationality is one of the keys of the book. Ideally, we are using our intelligence not just to solve isolated problems but to communicate and build networks between ourselves and other intelligences – natural and machine-made.

The acknowledgement of multiple other worlds, the worlds of others, is key to disentangling ourselves from our greatest social and technological deception, and re-entangling ourselves with a more meaningful and compassionate cosmology.

Bridle depicts a world in which everything has a kind of intelligence, which reminds me of the concept of panpsychism. While panpsychism is about the consciousness of non-human things, though, Bridle writes about the intelligence of non-human things. In some ways, it is less controversial to say that non-human things have intelligence (who wouldn’t admit that calculators are better at arithmetic?) but Bridle’s ecological model of intelligence is far more inclusive and interesting in its implications.

Here are two more of my favorite quotes from the book:

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 the sun, is always a plurality. Models of multiplicity are needed to make sense of this endlessly proliferating, teeming, oozing and entangling life. The tree is not a tree, but perhaps a bush, or a net – or a forest, or a lake. Or maybe a cloud?

But really what we are saying is what ecology has told us all along: we exist by virtue of our ties to one another and to the more-than-human world, and these ties are strengthened, not weakened, by the inclusion and equal participation of each and every member of that network.