Ways of Being

Bridle's writing weaves cultural threads that aren't usually seen together, and the resulting tapestry is iridescently original, deeply disorientating and yet somehow radically hopeful. The only futures that are viable will probably feel like that. This is a pretty amazing book, worth reading and rereading.

Bridle's writing weaves cultural threads that aren't usually seen together, and the resulting tapestry is iridescently original, deeply disorientating and yet somehow radically hopeful. The only futures that are viable will probably feel like that. This is a pretty amazing book, worth reading and rereading.

James Bridle is an artist who is fascinated by technology - creating a homemade self-driving car to understand how AIs "think", for example - and I loved their book, Ways of Being , which looks at artificial and animal intelligence, and how those challenge our assumptions about the world. Come for the slime mould replicating the Tokyo subway system, stay for the non-binary computer that used water to model the British economy.

Heady and often astonishing ... the scope of Bridle's curiosity and comprehension is immense ... there is something hopeful and even heartening in their faith that our current disastrous course might be shifted not only by new policies and technologies but also - and more fundamentally - by the power of new ideas.

If you plan on reading James Bridle's Ways of Being - and I cannot recommend highly enough that you do - you might consider forming a support group first. The ideas in this book are so big, so fascinating and yes, so foreign, you are going to need people to talk to about them ... Bridle has created a new way of thinking about our world, about being ... read this important book. Read it twice. Talk about it. Tell everyone you know.

It was so interesting that I luxuriated in every word. The conversation unfolding in these pages is fundamentally important and I would recommend it to absolutely everyone who wants to really think and reimagine a future that remains ours to make. I was left with a feeling that James Bridle hasn't so much written a book, as a manifesto for a new Green Enlightenment ... it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

In making clear the patience, imagination and humility required to better know and protect other forms of intelligence on Earth, Bridle has made an admirable contribution to the dawning interspecies age.

Bridle is a clear, artful writer and a sweeping thinker ... [A] hopeful book, almost an antidote. It imagines technology not as something separate and menacing, but as part of a grand unfolding - an 'efflorescence', to use Bridle's word - along an evolutionary continuum of human and 'more-than-human' ways of being in the world.

Bridle enlarges our definition of what 'intelligence' can be ... This book is an expansive guide, helping us turn our gaze outwards as we look for answers to the challenges of our time. The answers are out there, Bridle says, but Western science and imagination are only just beginning to take them seriously. Ways of Being is an absorbing, existential and ultimately hopeful book.

We must rethink what it means to be intelligent in a spirit of collaboration with non-humans ... What makes Bridle's book new and interesting is its insistence that AI, rightly used, can help in this project ... It may not be intelligence as we know it, but it is human, all too human.

James Bridle encourages you to widen the boundaries of your understanding, to contemplate the innate intelligence that animates the life force of octopuses and honeybees as well as apes and elephants. We humans are not alone in having a sense of community, a sense of fun, a sense of wonder and awe at the beauty of nature. Be prepared to re-evaluate your relationship with the amazing life forms with whom we share the planet. Fascinating, innovative and thought provoking I thoroughly recommend Ways of Being.

James Bridle is author of the acclaimed New Dark Age , about technology, knowledge and the end of the future. They wrote and presented the BBC Radio 4 series New Ways of Seeing , about how technology is changing visual culture; their writing on art, politics, culture and technology has appeared in magazines and newspapers including the Guardian , Wired , New Statesman , Frieze and ICON . Their artworks have been commissioned by galleries and institutions, including the V&A, Whitechapel, Barbican, Hayward and Serpentine, and exhibited worldwide and on the internet.