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

Imagine a system with clearly defined goals, sensors and effectors for reading and interacting with the world, the ability to recognize pleasure and pain as attractors and things to avoid, the resources to carry out its will, the legal and social standing to see that its needs are catered for, even respected. That's a description on an AI - it's also a description of a modern corporation.

What I think I’ve come to understand, more deeply than ever before, is that the enemy is not technology itself, but rather inequality and centralization of power and knowledge, and that the answer to these threats are education, diversity and justice. You don’t need artificial intelligence to work that out. You need actual intelligence. But more importantly, you need all the actual intelligences – every person, animal, plant and bug; every critter, every stone and every natural and unnatural system. You need a crab computer the size of the world. The problem is never technology itself; after all, remember, the computer is like the world. I remain as excited as ever about the power and possibilities of computers and networks as I have ever been; I just abhor the structures of power, injustice, extractive industry and computational thinking in which they are currently embedded. But I hope I’ve shown, to some degree, that it doesn’t need to be this way. There are always other ways of doing technology, just as there are other ways of doing intelligence and politics. Technology, after all, is what we can learn to do.

What would it mean to build artificial intelligences and other machines that were more like octopuses, more like fungi, or more like forests?

Where we start to move forward is when we learn to ask questions which are less concerned with ‘Are you like us?’, and more interested in ‘What is it like to be you?

within it subordinate their goals to that of the collective, which pursues the three corporate objectives of growth, profitability, and pain avoidance,’ Stross writes. ‘We are now living in a global state that has been structured for the benefit of non-human entities with non-human goals.’13

The logical conclusion of the development of wildlife corridors and protected areas -- even mobile ones -- is that there are places which must be left to non-humans, even in a more-than-human world. This is not a new suggestion. It goes back at least to the beginning of the twentieth century in Western culture, to the founding of National Parks in Europe and America, and it is intrinsic to non-Western conceptions of our place among the species of the planet. But there is growing awareness that it is now more urgent and must be much more extensive than a few scattered parks and sanctuaries. Indeed, there is a strong scientific and moral case that it should comprise at least half the entire Earth.

The telegraph allowed for the rapid transmission of ideas and information - but was quickly suborned by financiers, media moguls and the military, to leverage inequalities of information into inequalities of power and profits.

Intra-action is not interaction

We can’t read water in the same way as we can’t read data…Working with it makes us more aware of the distance between ourselves and the matter under consideration: it reminds us that we share this world rather than own it. Knowledge produced through the medium of the shifting surface of a bucket of water is made in cooperation with the world, rather than by conquering it.