You’re probably used to hearing about AI as this looming, metallic god—or maybe just a really fancy spreadsheet that’s going to take your job. But when I first cracked open Ways of Being James Bridle, I realized I was looking at the problem from the completely wrong end of the telescope. Bridle isn't just another tech critic wagging a finger at Silicon Valley. Honestly, they’re doing something much weirder and more profound. They are arguing that our current definition of "intelligence" is so narrow it’s actually suffocating us.
We’ve spent decades trying to build machines that think like us. But have we ever stopped to ask if "thinking like a human" is even the gold standard?
Bridle is a writer, artist, and technologist who has spent years hanging out at the intersection of satellite imagery, surveillance, and ecology. In Ways of Being, they suggest that the "intelligence" we’re building into our laptops is a pale imitation of the vast, shimmering brilliance found in octopuses, forests, and even the weather. It’s a book about more-than-human intelligence. It’s a plea to stop being so lonely in the universe.
The Problem with the Turing Test
Most of us know the Turing Test. It’s that old benchmark: if a computer can fool you into thinking it’s human, it’s intelligent. Bridle basically says this is a trap. It’s deeply anthropocentric. By forcing everything to mirror us, we miss the point of what other kinds of minds can do.
Think about the slime mold. Physarum polycephalum. It doesn't have a brain. It’s a single-celled organism. Yet, in famous experiments, these yellowish blobs have recreated the efficient layout of the Tokyo rail system just by searching for food. They solve complex spatial problems that take our best algorithms significant processing power. If we only count "intelligence" when it looks like a human in a suit solving a math problem, we’re blind to the slime mold’s genius.
Bridle argues that our tech reflects our politics. If we build AI based on competition, extraction, and individual logic, we get a world that looks like a corporate spreadsheet. But what if we built tech that learned from the way mycelial networks share nutrients?
Why Artificial Intelligence is a Misnomer
One of the most striking points in Ways of Being James Bridle is the deconstruction of the word "artificial." Bridle reminds us that everything we build comes from the earth. Silicon is sand. Servers are powered by electricity generated from wind, water, or ancient sunlight stored in coal.
There is no "cloud." There are just massive, energy-hungry buildings sitting on land, often near water sources they deplete.
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When we call it "artificial," we pretend it’s separate from nature. This separation allows us to ignore the environmental cost. Bridle’s work connects the high-tech world of machine learning back to the "low-tech" world of ecology. They discuss the concept of umwelt—a term from biologist Jakob von Uexküll. Every creature has its own "self-centered world" based on its senses. A tick perceives the world through light and heat. A bat perceives it through echoes.
Computers have an umwelt too. They "see" through sensors and data points we provide. The mistake we make is thinking the computer’s umwelt is the only objective reality, or that it’s superior to the sensory world of a whale or a redwood tree.
The Internet of Animals and More-Than-Human Communication
I’ve always found the "Internet of Things" a bit depressing. Do I really need my toaster to talk to my fridge? Bridle suggests a far more interesting alternative: the Internet of Animals.
They point to projects like ICARUS (International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space). This involves putting tiny sensors on thousands of animals to track their migrations. It’s not just for "science" in the boring sense. It’s a way of listening to the planet. Animals often react to tectonic shifts or weather changes long before our mechanical sensors do.
By networking with these creatures, we aren't just "using" them. We are expanding our own awareness. We are becoming part of a larger, planetary intelligence. This is a core theme of Ways of Being James Bridle. It’s about "solidarity" rather than "stewardship." Stewardship still implies we’re the bosses of the planet. Solidarity implies we’re all in this together.
Randomness and the Beauty of the "Glitch"
We love our tech to be predictable. We want 100% uptime. We want the algorithm to know exactly what song we want to hear next.
But Bridle has a long history with the concept of the "glitch." In their earlier work on "New Aesthetic," they looked at how satellite errors and digital artifacts reveal the hidden structures of our world. In Ways of Being, they take this further. They look at the randomness of the natural world as a feature, not a bug.
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There’s this amazing story about the "Random Number Generator" based on lava lamps. Because the movement of wax in a lava lamp is chaotic and unpredictable, Cloudflare uses a wall of them to generate truly random data for encryption. It’s a perfect Bridle-esque image: high-level internet security relying on the gooey, physical mess of a 1970s novelty lamp.
It proves that we need the physical, messy world to make our digital world function.
The Politics of Decentralization
You can't talk about Bridle without talking about politics. Not the "who are you voting for" kind, but the deep architecture of how power is distributed.
They are a big fan of decentralized systems. Not necessarily "crypto" in the way it’s currently hyped, but the idea of peer-to-peer networks. They look at the "Wood Wide Web"—the way trees use fungal networks to send warnings about pests or to feed struggling saplings. This is a non-hierarchical system. There is no "King Tree" giving orders.
Bridle suggests that our technology should move in this direction. Instead of massive, centralized AI owned by three companies in California, we should be looking at "local" AI. Small-scale models trained on local data to solve local problems, governed by the community.
It sounds radical. Maybe it is. But when you see the ecological and social toll of our current centralized tech, the radical path starts to look like the only sane one.
Practical Steps Toward a "Way of Being"
So, how do you actually live this? It’s one thing to read a 300-page book about slime molds and satellites, but it’s another to change how you interact with your phone.
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Honestly, it starts with a shift in attention.
Bridle isn't asking us to throw our iPhones into the sea. They are asking us to stop looking at the screen as a window into another world and start seeing it as a physical object connected to this one.
- Acknowledge the physical. Next time you use an AI tool or search Google, visualize the data center. Think about the cooling fans spinning in a desert somewhere. It grounds the "magic" in reality.
- Practice "not-knowing." One of Bridle’s biggest gripes is our obsession with "certainty." We want the algorithm to give us the "correct" answer. Try to embrace the ambiguous. Look at things—plants, animals, weather patterns—without immediately trying to categorize or "use" them.
- Support Open Source and Decentralized Tech. Move away from the "black box" systems. Use tools where you can see the "guts" of how they work. Knowledge should be a commons, like a forest, not a gated estate.
- Observe your local umwelt. Spend time watching how the non-human world interacts with your built environment. How do birds use the power lines? How does moss grow in the cracks of the sidewalk? This is "planetary intelligence" in action.
Decentering the Human Ego
The hardest part of Ways of Being James Bridle is the ego blow. We like being the smartest things on Earth. It’s our whole brand.
But Bridle argues that this arrogance is exactly what’s leading us toward ecological collapse. We’ve treated the world as a resource because we didn't think it was "intelligent" enough to deserve respect. By recognizing that intelligence is everywhere—in the flight of a bee, the growth of a lichen, and the flow of a river—we might start acting like members of a community instead of conquerors of a territory.
It’s a deeply hopeful book, despite the heavy themes. It suggests that the tools we’ve built—the sensors, the networks, the code—can actually help us reconnect with the earth if we use them with a bit more humility.
We don't need a "super-intelligence" to save us. We just need to wake up to the intelligence that’s been here all along.
If you want to dive deeper, don't just read the book. Go outside. Watch a crow solve a problem. Look at a satellite map of your hometown and see where the water goes. The "ways of being" Bridle describes aren't just theories; they are happening right now, right outside your window, whether you have Wi-Fi or not.