Showing results by author "James Bridle" in All Categories

Recent years have seen rapid advances in 'artificial' intelligence, which increasingly appears to be something stranger than we ever imagined. At the same time, we are becoming more aware of the other intelligences which have been with us all along, unrecognised. These other beings are the animals, plants and natural systems that surround us, and are slowly revealing their complexity and knowledge - just as the new technologies we've built are threatening to cause their extinction, and ours.

Artist, technologist, and philosopher James Bridle’s Ways of Being is a brilliant, searching exploration of different kinds of intelligence—plant, animal, human, artificial—and how they transform our understanding of humans’ place in the cosmos. What does it mean to be intelligent? Is it something unique to humans, or shared with other beings—beings of flesh, wood, stone, and silicon? The last few years have seen rapid advances in “artificial” intelligence.

As the world around us increases in technological complexity, our understanding of it diminishes. Underlying this trend is a single idea: The belief that our existence is understandable through computation, and more data is enough to help us build a better world. In reality, we are lost in a sea of information, increasingly divided by fundamentalism, simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories, and post-factual politics. Author James Bridle surveys the history of art, technology, and information systems and reveals the dark clouds that gather over our dreams of the digital sublime.

Der Siegeszug unserer entfesselten Technologien destabilisiert den gesamten Planeten und eröffnet ein neues Zeitalter: das New Dark Age. Eine seiner erschreckendsten Signaturen ist der Klimawandel, den James Bridle in diesem Kapitel seines aufsehenerregenden Buches beschreibt. Während neue Technologien immer schneller und immer massiver bis in die letzten Winkel unseres Lebens vordringen, sind wir immer weniger dazu in der Lage, sie unseren Erfordernissen anzupassen. Sie sind längst zu einer Bedrohung für humane Lebensformen geworden.