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I am very pleased that Ways of Being is now available in Spanish, courtesy of Galaxia Gutenberg, joining translations in German, French, Italian, Hungarian, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese, and other languages. I did a small interview with El Mundo, on AI and more-than-human relations, which I am publishing in English below.

1. Repsol, a Spanish company, features prominently at the beginning of
   your book as it uses Artificial Intelligence to search for oil in
   Greece, leading to the destruction of the ecosystem. When something as
   old and harmful as fossil fuels joins forces with something as new and
   seemingly positive as Artificial Intelligence, should it alarm us that
   things may not be as they are portrayed?”

Artificial Intelligence, as it currently actually exists, is a business technology developed by corporations for capitalist ends, so we shouldn’t really be surprised when it is put to use in ways which continue to degrade the biosphere and corrode human relations. Of course, too, the hype is about making the world better, but hasn’t it always been? As the writer Joanna Maciejewska recently put it, “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.” We could say the same about AI and the environment: what do we actually want this tool to do, and who should be imagining it and working with it to make that so?

2. Is the technological determinism that claims technology is
   unstoppable a fait accompli strategy that leads us to disaster?

Technology in itself is not the problem; any technological problem, at sufficient scale, is a political problem. It matters who builds and deploys technology, and historically this power has been concentrated in the hands of corporate elites and governments who don’t always act in the best interests of people and the planet. This isn’t inevitable: most of us have access to skills and resources to shift this power towards mutual flourishing, but it’s not easy; political change never is. But the more of us who can imagine a world in which technology is a tool for emancipation and equality, rather than control, the more we can determine the future of that world together.

3. You write: “True AI is already here: it’s corporations.” It is
   fascinating to expand the concept in this way. Is AI any golem that
   has escaped its creator’s control?

I don’t think AI has escaped its creator’s control; it’s doing exactly what its creators want it to do, which is make money. AI is not some strange, otherworldly force from nowhere, it’s part of our existing systems of culture, law, and society, and it emerges from them. I talk about corporations as AI because I want to emphasise that we already live within complex, opaque systems which we have little control over – financial markets, state governments, the global climate – but we also have cultural tools to address them, from art to political activism. Changing the status quo involves both concrete steps to reduce inequalities of power and knowledge, as well as re-imagining what we think technology and governance are for.

4. When Silicon Valley tells us we should fear AI, do you think AI is
   also going to replace even them? Isn’t it also a way of diverting
   attention by pointing to Skynet so we don’t think about the gigantic
   power Silicon Valley is accumulating?

“Silicon Valley”, meaning the quite small number of powerful people who control the major technology companies, and have always controlled such powerful entities, including governments, like to pretend that they don’t have power, that they too are at the mercy of the systems that in fact we all create together. This pretense disempowers the rest of us too, by making us think that we too lack the power to make change in the world. AI does promise, or at least make possible, a radical shift in power, but it is unlikely to do so in a way that benefits all of us when it’s in the hands of a few corporations. We should always be critical of proclamations from the powerful that X – whether that’s AI, corporate taxes, or environmental protections – is dangerous to all of us, when in reality what is threatened is their own power. Nobody ever gave that up willingly, and they will do anything to continue their own dominance, including inventing fantasies of Skynet.

5. Your main hypothesis is that someone has deceived us into thinking
   that there is only one kind of intelligence when there are many. What
   mental journey led you to that reflection?

All my ideas come out of the world, from encounters with the Earth and the many different beings that live on and in it. In the last few years, as I’ve delved deeper into ecological thinking and forging stronger relationships with the more-than-human world – meaning us and everyone else who lives here – this has radically shifted my thinking about technology. One aspect of this is the realisation that what we call ‘Artificial Intelligence’ is really only one kind of intelligence. Just as birds, dogs, trees, monkeys and oceans all manifest their own kind of intelligence based on their context, experience, and embodiment, an intelligence no ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ than our own, but evolved for its particular circumstance, so AI is currently evolving it’s own capitalist, machine-like intelligence because of the context in which it is being raised. It’s helpful for me to think of it this way because it grounds some of the wilder thinking about AI in a broader ecological context, and also helps me to re-imagine how it could be otherwise.

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

This is the logical next step, and of course it applies to more than AI. What would all of our technologies look like if they were firstly more concerned about bringing us closer to the world than separating us from it, and secondly what can we learn from non-humans about how to do this? Octopuses, for example, have minds which are physically spread throughout their whole bodies, federated brains with neurons in their arms, which allow for a radically different kind of thinking: more responsive, perhaps more creative, and more in tune with their fluid environment. Forests are superorganisms consisting of many beings working together, intimately entangled, and more often co-operating, rather than competing, for resources. We have become programmed – by science, technology, and modernity – to think of minds as little boxes trapped inside our own heads, or inside machines, that we miss out on the reality of intelligence as something embodied, enacted, and networked in an infinite number of possible configurations.

7. What is the ecology of technology?

Over the twentieth century, almost all scientific and philosophical disciplines discovered ecology, which is the simple idea that everything is interrelated, that it is impossible to study any phenomenon in isolation, because it impacts, and is impacted by, everything around it. This applies to physics as much as biology, in the discovery of the quantum world, and to economics as much as sociology. Technology has an ecology as well: the cultures it is a product of, the rules which govern it, the effects it has on our minds, our bodies, and the planet. We tend to think of technology as lots of little boxes, which do specific things, when really it is a network of relationships, and these relationships matter more than what any particular little box does.

8. In New Dark Age, you explained that we live in a world so
   technologically complex that we are incapable of understanding it.
   What possibilities of action does a human being, walking blindly, have
   then?

When I say that we are incapable of understanding the complexity of contemporary technologies, I don’t mean that we are blind. The kind of understanding that we like to think we have, the ability to break something down into its component parts, master it, and control it for our own ends, simply does not apply to complex systems like a worldwide computer network, or a financial market, or the global climate. Rather, these are systems which we live inside, which we shape and which shape us in turn. This realisation shifts the question from one of understanding – a matter of power, control, and dominance – to one of ethics. How to live justly within such systems, in good relationship with everyone else, human and non-human, for the mutual benefit of all? The implications of such a question are not something we are blind to at all.

9. If one day we contact a highly advanced extraterrestrial
   intelligence, would it be more like an octopus or Elon Musk?

Scientists have recently begun working with, and coming to recognise, the organisms which live deep within the earth’s crust; which exist by digesting exotic minerals and excreting other ones, which might form some of the foundations of all life. In recent decades we’ve met creatures who live in total darkness at the bottom of the ocean, huddled around hot vents, breathing only methane. Others flourish atop dry mountains, or in the iron-rich rivers of mine tailings. I cannot even begin to imagine what else might be out there, but if if we meet it, it is likely to have got there by working with, rather than against, its own environment and community.

10. “The world is not like a computer. Computers are like the world.”
    Is another kind of computing possible?

Almost all the computers in the world are one kind of computer: the automated, binary machine invented by Alan Turing in the 1940s. Yet infinite other kinds of computer are possible, from hydrological computers which use the flow of water, rather than electrons, to calculate the freeze rate of concrete or the likelihood of a recession, to quantum computers operating at vastly accelerated speeds, to Gaia, a conception of the world as a vast, cybernetic system constantly regulating itself towards flourishing. And all these are just ways of thinking about thinking, abstractions from the actual business of living together on the Earth, useful some of the time, less so at others. Everything is not only possible, it is happening all the time.