Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

Magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk 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.

This week, we're featuring a conversation with the writer, artist, and technologist James

Bridal.

I recently spoke with James about their work and their new book, Ways of Being, Beyond Human Intelligence.

It was an expansive conversation that covered a great deal of ground.

From our relationship to technology and AI, the origins of modern computing,

the many forms of more than human intelligences that surround us, and what kinds of solidarity

we need at this time of great change and crisis. James questions our fundamental assumptions

about intelligence and explores how radical technological models

can decentralize power, widen our thinking beyond human-centric ways of knowing, and

become portals enter deeper relationships with the living world.

In your latest book, Ways of Being, you explore the many types of intelligence that exist in the more than human worlds, intelligences that we need to learn from and integrate into our consciousness

and technologies if we are to learn to live in balance with the living world, and that for far too long,

at least in our dominant Western society, we've had a very limited definition and understanding of intelligence,

that you describe in the book as what humans do, and that this definition has played a profound role in shaping technology and how we use it, from computers

to most recently artificial intelligence.

Can you talk about this human-centered definition of intelligence and its impact on technology

and AI?

So I come to this sphere, to this area, to this thinking, from a background in technology.

...