We must all become Doctor Dolittles and listen to the wisdom of animals

One day the writer and artist James Bridle rented a hatchback, taped a smartphone to the steering wheel and installed some webcams in order to make his own self-driving car. Armed with software cut-and-pasted from the internet, his aim was to collaborate with the AI he’d thus devised and travel to Mount Parnassus, sacred to Dionysus and home of the Muses, ‘to be elevated to the peak of knowledge, craft and skill’. Just try telling that to the traffic cops.

This batty project had a serious point. Bridle wanted to subvert the idea that we cede control to our dismal robot overlords every time we plug co-ordinates into the GPS. To that end, he went about training the car, which he had rigged up with what amounted to a neural network that functioned like a simplified brain. The car learned from visual cues that, say, the lines on a road are painted to ensure vehicles don’t cross them and become crash statistics.

‘I wanted to understand AI better,’ Bridle writes. ‘I wanted to have the experience of collaborating with an intelligent machine.’ This is the theme of his book: we must rethink what it means to be intelligent in a spirit of collaboration with non-humans. Alan Turing’s 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence suggested a computer was intelligent if it could engage a human in conversation – which is, apart from anything else, offensive to gorillas and, quite possibly, slime. Bridle introduces us to alternative intelligences such as the octopus, which, so far as I understand it, thinks with its tentacles as much as its brain. He also celebrates the wood wide web – the means by which trees form a mycorrhizal network to pass signals via fungal threads, thereby sharing resources and warning peers about incoming threats.

David Attenborough argued on the same lines in his recent Green Planet series, suggesting that plants are far from stationary and silent: rather, they might be conceived of as members of chatty mutual aid societies, from which we would do well to learn if we are to survive climate change.