Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emmanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine,

located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Meawak people of present-day, Marin County.

Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting

ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Once existing only in the realm of science fiction, artificial intelligence has now evolved to be part of the everyday.

We see AI springing up on social media platforms, in our workplaces, our education systems,

even our homes. ChatGBTGBT has both captured popular imagination with its novelty

and exhumed core fears around technology,

that it may supersede our control, that it may bring greater harm to an already darkening world.

And while computers have been inseparable from our modern way of life for decades now,

we find ourselves in the midst of a new technological zeitgeist, one of consumer AI,

in which no set direction, no definable goal, no boundaries yet exist.

As we open to these new technologies to reach beyond our own capabilities and intelligence,

what might become possible.

This week, we reshare my conversation with artist, writer, and technologist James Bridle,

who questions our fundamental assumptions about intelligence.

As they interrogate where AI models originate from and who they serve,

James advocates for decentralized technology and knowledge systems in the hope that we might

redistribute power and agency among all beings.

Acknowledging the correlation between our narrow definition of intelligence and what our

technologies look like, they wonder how an embrace of the unknowable and the unpredictable

...