February Book Club Meeting:
Join us this Sunday, 1st March, 6:30 pm — 8:00 pm, where we’ll be delving into key themes and ideas from Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for Planetary Intelligence by James Bridle.
Call link: Zoom
Payment details (£8): PayPal @amritakaur@bhohi.co.uk // Wise (best for international transfers), @amritakaurb2
Please drop me a message if you are planning to attend!
Dear friends,
In a recent interview, I heard environmental journalist Elizabeth Kolbert say she is often asked how she gets up in the morning, given the depressing nature of environmental affairs. Her response was: “I always say that the world is a terrifying place — and right now it is very terrifying — but the world is also a fascinating place, full of wonder and awe.”
Reading James Bridle’s Ways of Being this past month has felt like a steady drip-feed of shots of wonder and awe. To quote the perfectly succinct response of a fellow book clubber: ‘just wow’. The book has given me a great appreciation for the truth in Elizabeth’s words, how fascination is such a potent antidote to despair. Another reason why we should all be reading more.
And wow, is James’ book a giant compendium of fascination. From evolutionary biology, quantum physics, ecology, computational science, linguistics, genetics, archaeology, natural history and politics, he leaves no stone unturned in his quest to bring forth a powerful new vision for a world of non-human intelligences, re-entangling machines with the earth that they are born out of in what he calls an ‘ecology of technology’:
If we are to address the wholesale despoilation of the planet and our growing helplessness in the face of vast computational power, then we must find ways to reconcile our technological prowess and sense of human uniqueness with an earthy sensibility and an attentiveness to the interconnectedness of all things. We must learn to live with the world, rather than to dominate it. In short, we must discover an ecology of technology.”
Radically (perhaps especially so for many of us technologically-averse nature lovers such as myself), he believes that artificial intelligence holds the potential to bring us closer to the earth, exploring what it would mean to build machines that were more like octopuses, fungi, or forests, and, going even further, arguing that doing so could even lead us to a more equitable and just world:
It was not technology that cast us out of Eden, or sent us fleeing from Babel. It was not technology which designated non-human life as brutish or mechanical, fit only for the slaughterhouse and the vivisection table. That was greed and hubris, Aristotle and Descartes, the edifice of human exceptionalism and Western European philosophy. Technology embodies the ideas and metaphors of its time.
Though quite a theoretical and technical read at times, I think the book’s impact is spiritual in several ways, most significantly for me, it has returned a certain spark of light — wisdom, possibility, beauty — to the otherwise dark and dismal discourse on AI and apocalyptic futures. There is another paradigm possible, one that doesn’t exclude the full power of technological intelligence from our lives, but that actually integrates it in a way that empowers and enables us in creating new systems and structures in service to the thriving of the whole community of life.
If the message of Rob Hopkins in last month’s read was the urgent need for inspiring visions of the kind of future that we want to live in, and to get to know what that world looks and feels like, then Bridle’s book answers this call spectacularly. I think it’s an important book for our time and urge you all to get a copy and read it.
I greatly look forward to discussing it together at our book club meeting this weekend.
Book Club Hiatus
The Club will be taking a short one to two-month intermission, so there will be no planned reads or meetings until further notice. I’m excited to relaunch later in Spring, by which time we’ll have the joy in the northern hemisphere of being able to return to our favourite outdoor reading spots! I’m looking forward to a picnic blanket by the river, or under the oak tree, or next to the little rose garden in my local park.
My thanks to all of you who have joined along the way these past six months, and as always, I look forward to meeting more of you in the future.
Amrita
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