Support for KQED podcasts comes from San Francisco International Airport.

You can fly back in time and visit SFO's Aviation Museum and Library to learn about the history of commercial aviation.

No boarding pass needed. Learn more at flysafo.com slash museum.

Greetings, boomtown. The Xfinity Wi-Fi is booming.

Xfinity combines the power of internet and mobile.

So we've all got lightning fast speeds at home and on the go!

Learn more at Xfinity.com.

Restrictions apply.

Xfinity Internet required.

Actual speeds vary.

From KQED.

Thank you. From KQED.

From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal.

What would it mean to build artificial intelligence and other machines that were more like octopuses, more like fungi, or more like forests?

Ask James Bridal in their new book, Ways of Being?

Bridal's book explores these other forms of intelligence to map out what an ecology of technology could look like and how we can work together with the more than human world to better understand, navigate, live with, and preserve the complexities of our planet.

Bridal joins us proprietor of the

brilliant Middots blog, Book 2. It was there that Bridal explored

way out past the boundaries of what books were or could be based on the bracing influx of ideas

from the digital world. Then they created one of the world's most influential tumblers, a collection

of images held together by Bridal's curatorial genius.

It was called the new aesthetic, and it was evidence that technology was generating new ways

...