Dear friends,

I’ve just returned from two weeks on the road — first in Seattle for a live event with Isabel Wilkerson, and then in New York with Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. These were very different conversations, in very different settings, yet each was exuberant and wise and immensely refreshing in its own way. I can’t wait to share them with you as this joy of a season continues to unfold. 

And I am delighted to announce that my conversation with the technologist/artist James Bridle is finally here as this week’s episode. If you’ve been in this newsletter in the last half year, you’ll know that I’ve been in a kind of conversation with James Bridle inside myself that started last summer. I reflected on their book, Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence, in our first ever and rather capacious “contemplative reading” adventure last fall. 

We joke at On Being about the Great Producer in the Sky, who more than a few times across the years has conspired to make our weekly offering feel unexpectedly relevant to current events. This has turned out to be one of those weeks, with all the flurry of reporting around ChatGPT and attendant revelations of startling, unnerving capabilities of Artificial Intelligence that have taken many of us by surprise. 

James Bridle has opened my mind wide about what AI actually is and might become — context I’ve been grateful for as I seek to take in these new revelations. In writing and in this rich, sprawling conversation, they pull together a whole, coherent, intriguing, and inviting picture from many kinds of truth we humans are learning/re-learning: about the natural world and our belonging to it; about the way this has been carried forward in time below the level of consciousness in language; about the deepest meanings of intelligence that we have under-valued in modernity.

That James Bridle wraps arms and imagination around all of this through a lens of our lives with "the more-than-human world" — and expansively includes AI in this view — feels so welcome to me. I hope you might experience this, too.