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

located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Miwok people in present-day Marin County.

Each week, we feature interviews, stories, poetry, and author-narrated essays, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

For the most part, intelligence is defined by how human brains process things.

We are the yardstick that we measure all other living beings against.

And I find this to be truly limiting. It blinds us to different ways we could relate to the world

around us, to the immense capabilities of other creatures, and keeps our worldview human-centric.

It's a frame that not only mediates how we perceive intelligence,

but it also shapes how we create it,

for what is AI, if not a mirror, of ourselves?

To help transform some of the beliefs that are fueling

our ecological unraveling,

can we grasp the opportunities presented to us by AI, by our increasing awareness

of more than human intelligence, and by the ever-changing landscape of computers, to reimagine

what intelligence is?

In this expansive conversation from our archive, writer, artist, and technologist, James

Bridal, looks at how our glorification of our own intelligence has shaped the history of our

technology and anticipates in our future an ecological turn in how we view and create it.

James draws on principles of decentralized knowledge systems, a redistribution of agency among

all beings, and an embrace of what is unknowable to us to envision a way that our technology

could move away from the reductionism of ones and zeros, and towards reflecting and helping

us recognize other kinds of intelligence

...