You don’t need artificial intelligence to find oil in Epirus; but you need AI to exploit it.

In 2014, Repsol and IBM Watson–the division of the US tech giant responsible for artificial intelligence–announced that they were collaborating ‘to leverage cognitive technologies that will help transform the oil and gas industry’. These technologies included ‘prototype cognitive applications specifically designed to augment Repsol’s strategic decision making in the optimization of oil reservoir production and in the acquisition of new oil fields’. 3

the most advanced technologies, processes and businesses on the planet–artificial intelligence and machine-learning platforms built by IBM, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and others–are brought to bear on fossil fuel extraction, production and distribution: the number one driver of climate change, of CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions, and of global extinction.

Driven by the logic of contemporary capitalism and the energy requirements of computation itself, the deepest need of an AI in the present era is the fuel for its own expansion. What it needs is oil, and it increasingly knows where to find it.

We tend to imagine AI as embodied in something like a robot, or a computer, but it can really be instantiated as anything. Imagine a system with clearly defined goals, sensors and effectors for reading and interacting with the world, the ability to recognize pleasure and pain as attractors and things to avoid, the resources to carry out its will, and the legal and social standing to see that its needs are catered for, even respected. That’s a description of an AI–it’s also a description of a modern corporation. For this ‘corporate AI’, pleasure is growth and profitability, and pain is lawsuits and drops in shareholder value. Corporate speech is protected, corporate personhood recognized, and corporate desires are given freedom, legitimacy and sometimes violent force by international trade laws, state regulation–or lack thereof–and the norms and expectations of capitalist society. Corporations mostly use humans as their sensors and effectors; they also employ logistics and communications networks, arbitrage labour and financial markets, and recalculate the value of locations, rewards and incentives based on shifting input and context. Crucially, they lack empathy, or loyalty, and they are hard–although not impossible–to kill.

Charles Stross likens our age of corporate control to the aftermath of an alien invasion. ‘Corporations do not share our priorities. They are hive organisms constructed out of teeming workers who join or leave the collective: those who participate within it subordinate their goals to that of the collective, which pursues the three corporate objectives of growth, profitability, and pain avoidance,’ Stross writes. ‘We are now living in a global state that has been structured for the benefit of non-human entities with non-human goals.’ 13

when we talk about AI, we’re mostly talking about this kind of corporate intelligence, and ignoring all the other kinds of things that AI–that any kind of intelligence–could be.

the development of AI is led primarily by venture-funded technology companies. The definition of intelligence which is framed, endorsed and ultimately constructed in machines is a profit-seeking, extractive one. This framing is then repeated in our books and films, in the news media and the public imagination–in science fiction tales of robot overlords and all-powerful, irresistible algorithms–until it comes to dominate our thinking and understanding.

Beyond the narrow framing put forward by both technology companies and the doctrine of human uniqueness (the idea that, among all beings, human intelligence is singular and pre-eminent) exists a whole realm of other ways of thinking and doing intelligence. It is the task of this book to do some of that reimagining: to look beyond the horizon of our own selves and our own creations to glimpse another kind, or many different kinds, of intelligence, which have been here, right in front of us, the whole time–and in many cases have preceded us.

the increasingly evident and pressing reality of our utter entanglement with the more-than-human world.

If we are to address the wholesale despoliation of the planet, and our growing helplessness in the face of vast computational power, then we must find ways to reconcile our technological prowess and sense of human uniqueness with an earthy sensibility and an attentiveness to the interconnectedness of all things. We must learn to live with the world, rather than seek to dominate it. In short, we must discover an ecology of technology.

Ecology is fundamentally different to the other sciences in that it describes a scope and an attitude of study, rather than a field.

Every discipline discovers its own ecology in time, as it shifts inexorably from the walled gardens of specialized research towards a greater engagement with the wider world. As we expand our field of view, we come to realize that everything impacts everything else–and we find meaning in these interrelationships.

the history of technology is largely one of wilful blindness to the context and consequences of its enactment.

An ecology of technology, then, is concerned with the interrelationships between technology and the world, its meaning and materiality, its impact and uses, beyond the everyday, deterministic fact of its own existence. We will start to construct such an ecology by examining many of the assumptions and biases that are built into our ways of thinking, and which are subsequently embedded in the tools we use every day so deeply that we rarely think to question them. The most powerful of these is the idea that human intelligence is unique, and uniquely significant, in the world.

Lynn Margulis, the most significant evolutionary biologist of the twentieth century, had this to say about our entanglement with non-human life: ‘No matter how much our own species preoccupies us, life is a far wider system. Life is an incredibly complex interdependence of matter and energy among millions of species beyond (and within) our own skin. These Earth aliens are our relatives, our ancestors, and part of us. They cycle our matter and bring us water and food. Without “the other” we do not survive.’ 20

Given that we humans and the things we make are inextricably entangled with the more-than-human world, and given that rethinking our relationship with that world demands that we acknowledge its existence and agency, we must think a little about the form that relationship might take. Part of that relationship is simply care: a constant attentiveness to the meaning and affect of our entanglement.

Confronted by ever more complex and opaque technologies, we capitulate to their commands, and a combination of fear and boredom is the frequent result.

The umwelt of the tick parasite, for example, consists of just three incredibly specialized facts or factors: the odour of butyric acid, which indicates the presence of an animal to feed upon; the temperature of 37 degrees Celsius, which indicates the presence of warm blood; and the hairiness of mammals, which it navigates to find its sustenance. From these three qualities, the tick’s whole universe blooms. 3

Crucially, an organism creates its own umwelt, but also continually reshapes it in its encounter with the world. In this way, the concept of umwelt asserts both the individuality of every organism and the inseparability of its mind from the world. Everything is unique and entangled. Of course, in a more-than-human world, it’s not only organisms which have an umwelt–everything does.

The current, dominant form of artificial intelligence, the kind you hear everyone talking about, is not creative or collaborative or imaginative. It is either totally subservient–frankly, stupid–or it is oppositional, aggressive and dangerous (and possibly still stupid). It is pattern analysis, image description, facial recognition and traffic management; it is oil prospecting, financial arbitrage, autonomous weapons systems, and chess programmes that utterly destroy human opposition. Corporate tasks, corporate profits, corporate intelligence.

Octopuses are a confederation of intelligent parts, which means their awareness, as well as their thinking, occurs in ways which are radically different to our own.

there are many ways of ‘doing’ intelligence: behaviourally, neurologically, physiologically and socially. This bears repeating: intelligence is not something which exists, but something one does; it is active, interpersonal and generative, and it manifests when we think and act.

Intelligence is one among many ways of being in the world: it is an interface to it; it makes the world manifest.

Intelligence, when we perceive it at play in the world, is not a collection of abstract modes: a concatenation of self-awareness, theory of mind, emotional understanding, creativity, reasoning, problem-solving and planning that we can separate and test for under laboratory conditions. These are simply reductive and all-too-human interpretations of a more boundless phenomenon. Rather, intelligence is a stream, even an excess, of all these qualities, more and less, manifesting as something greater, something only recognizable to us at certain times, but immanent in every movement, every gesture, every interaction of the more-than-human world.

Powers and Simard suggested that another way of seeing the world was possible, one infinitely more vital and interconnected than any I had previously imagined. In their worlds, information pulsed beneath the ground and floated on the breeze, interactions pulsed and shifted to the rhythm of the seasons, and knowledge and understanding grew, slowly but sturdily, over decades and centuries. Beyond the human, beyond the animal, now appeared another domain–multiple kingdoms–of flourishing, active, even intelligent beings: plants and fungi.

Notoriously, the bestselling 1973 work of pseudoscience The Secret Life of Plants used lie detectors and tape recorders to ‘prove’ that plants possessed emotions, telepathic abilities–and hearing. Roundly decried and debunked by scientists, the book’s claims linger in the popular imagination, not least in the persistent belief that plants like classical music, or grow better when people talk to them.

Perhaps we should be thinking more carefully about the ecosystem in which we are raising AI, particularly the kind of aggressive, domineering and destructive forms which seem to be proliferating. That these systems are overly concerned with profit and loss, winning and losing, control and dominance, suggests that their ecological niche–the slice of the environment shaping their evolution–is somewhat narrow. Their learned responses are that of a corporate intelligence, evolving within the arid, airless ecology of neoliberal capitalism, tech company boardrooms and ever-increasing financial and social disparities. If we wish them to evolve differently, we will need to address and alter this ecology.

plants have a world. What does this mean? It means that plants sense and respond to a world which they experience, a world of their own making–and, furthermore, that there is a ‘they’ there to do the sensing and responding, a subject rather than an object, a kind of self, however abstruse and unlike our own. They have an umwelt all of their own. Plants encounter, access, influence and are influenced by the world on their own terms and in their own fashion. Most of these experiences and responses are and will always be unknowable to us; but hearing–being an ability we share–makes them thinkable. Suddenly, from being background, plants leap into action once again, present and attentive. The act of hearing transforms vegetal passivity into active listening, leafy torpidity into vibrant participation.

Other worlds are not only possible, they are already present. The acknowledgement of multiple other worlds, the worlds of others, is key to disentangling ourselves from our greatest social and technological deception, and re-entangling ourselves with a more meaningful and compassionate cosmology.

Since the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the scientific revolutions that followed it, our understanding of the world has been shaped by a misplaced objectivity–the belief that the world has a single, coherent narrative and that there exists a one-size-fits-all framework for interpreting it.

The attempt to force the world to conform to our portrayal of it, and the friction this attempt generates in our lives and societies, is behind the great malaise of our age: widespread confusion, shading into anger, rage and fear. It is the result of trying to find truth and meaning in a single world, a single box into which we cram all the contradictions and paradoxes of reality.

By dispensing with the fallacy of one world for all, we come to the awareness of a greater multiplicity of worlds which are held in common. This is a far richer cosmology than the solipsism of one world; it is an acknowledgement of communal being and experience. We share a world.

the twin hazards that we face in thinking about the more-than-human world: anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism. The former is the danger of thinking ourselves to be at the centre of everything; the latter is the danger that, in trying to access non-human experience, we simply mould it into a poor shadow of our own. Fully recognizing that non-human plants, animals and others have their own worlds which are fundamentally different and unknowable to us is to begin to end human exceptionalism and human supremacism. Humans are not at the centre of the universe.

Historically, scientists’ approach to the study of plants has been a mechanistic one; that is, they break them down into a series of actions and reactions, viewing them more like a series of component mechanisms, as a series of tiny, interconnected machines, rather than as whole organisms. And this means we regard them in much the same way as we regard machines, capable only of reacting to stimuli in automatic, pre-determined and predictable ways. Botany sees only narrow cause and effect, and often fails to fully consider the whole life and experience of the organism.

Mimosa leaves have small hydraulic structures at their base which, by pumping or draining water, allow them to expand and contract, forcing the leaves to curl. The curling is understood to be a response to a threat: either from animal predation, or excessive heat and evaporation.

Mimosas–and, we must now understand, all plants–are not machines. They are more than the sum of a set of pre-programmed actions and reactions. They learn, remember and change their behaviour in response to the world.

Science has a tendency–a prime directive, even–to understand phenomena through the structures that produce them; that old ecological relevance again. It understands memory as a structural process which takes place in the brain, in the interaction between particular molecules and synaptic connections. In this sense, memory depends on the brain. How then can something without a discernible brain remember? It’s simply unthinkable.

Like the intelligence of the octopus, the memory of a plant is an analogous phenomenon running on completely different hardware.

I’ve had my own personal experience with Ayahuasca, one of the plants she speaks with, and it has spoken to me, too. I have heard a plant speak, and I still don’t fully understand how, nor can I adequately describe the experience, but I know it to have happened, and it changed me utterly.

Plants make decisions based on complex information, such as picking the best response to nearby competition. Grow sideways, root deeper or shoot higher? They can tailor chemical releases to attract or repel animals–poisoning some and creating addiction in others. They have proprioception–the ‘sixth sense’ which enables us to know where parts of our bodies are without looking. They recognize and respond differently to kin and close relatives. In short, plants act, and they act in ways which, when animals do likewise, we call indicators of intelligence.

The exact form of plant intelligence must always remain partially or mostly unknowable to us, because of the radical difference which exists between our own lives and our experience of the world, and that of plants.

one of the strengths of plants is precisely that they have no central, irreplaceable organs. Plants are modular–they can survive losing 90 per cent of themselves, and many species can reproduce from broken pieces, or cuttings.

hardly any new quaking aspen have grown from seed in the western United States for 10,000 years, yet the aspen remains North America’s most widely distributed tree.

the disappearance of bears, wolves and mountain lions has led to an explosion of mule deer. The deer, along with cattle, graze on young aspen shoots. Once areas are eaten or cut back, they don’t regrow.

the kingdom of fungi and the kingdom of plants are not really that separate. They are physically, socially, vitally entangled with one another. Understanding the nature of this interrelationship is vital to understanding our own entanglement with the more-than-human world. The earliest plants were mere agglomerations of cellular tissue, lacking roots or leaves or any of the specialized structures we recognize in plants today. They were the descendants of simple marine algae which washed ashore and found some purchase on beaches and cliffs, sustaining themselves through photosynthesis alone. But around 400 million years ago–at least, that is the date of the oldest fossils we’ve found–these proto-plants began to associate with fungi: to evolve lobes and fleshy organs to house mycorrhizal partners. This is the origin of all plant roots: questing limbs in search, not of food itself, but of partners in the process of producing life.

The earliest plants were mere agglomerations of cellular tissue, lacking roots or leaves or any of the specialized structures we recognize in plants today. They were the descendants of simple marine algae which washed ashore and found some purchase on beaches and cliffs, sustaining themselves through photosynthesis alone. But around 400 million years ago–at least, that is the date of the oldest fossils we’ve found–these proto-plants began to associate with fungi: to evolve lobes and fleshy organs to house mycorrhizal partners. This is the origin of all plant roots: questing limbs in search, not of food itself, but of partners in the process of producing life.

Plants and fungi don’t merely interact underground, they penetrate one another. Parts of fungi actually live within the cells of plants, and they form in effect an extended root system, more than a hundred times longer than the roots of the plant itself. And these fungal strands, called mycelium, extend everywhere and through everything. What we take to be the soil itself is actually part fungus–somewhere between a third and a half of its living mass. Plant, fungus, and the entire ecosystem on which we and all life on earth depends, is inseparable, right down to the cellular level. This relationship between fungus and plant is symbiotic: each depends upon the other. As the mycologist Merlin Sheldrake puts it: ‘What we call “plants” are in fact fungi which have evolved to farm algae, and algae that have evolved to farm fungi.’

a climate model which explored how the availability or otherwise of phosphorus–a key plant nutrient–played a role in the transformation of the atmosphere which occurred in the Devonian period, some 300 to 400 million years ago. This is the period in which plants, already well established on land, massively expanded their range, growing faster and taller and more widely than ever before. The sudden appearance of so many green plants resulted in a dramatic reduction of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere, as much as 90 per cent compared to the previous era.

the real cause, it seems, might have been mycorrhiza. The number which made the biggest difference to the model wasn’t simply the amount of phosphorus available to plants, but the efficiency with which they could take it up, an efficiency entirely determined by plants’ mycorrhizal networks.

the amount of carbon dioxide and oxygen in the atmosphere, as well as the global temperature–the entire climatic system–was dependent upon the mycorrhizal relationship between plants and fungi. All life, and all changes in life, depends upon mycorrhizal relationships.

In the 1990s a new type of science, called network theory, began to emerge from the study of the World Wide Web itself. A team of researchers at the University of Notre Dame, led by the Hungarian-American physicist Albert-László Barabási, mapped the topology of a portion of the Web, and discovered that some nodes, which they called ‘hubs’, had far more connections than others, but that the distribution of these connections was consistent across the whole network. The Web, they reported, was ‘scale-free’, meaning that the network could continue to function regardless of the number of the nodes, and as it grew, its underlying structure remained the same.

Mycelium (the connecting threads of the network) are not mere transmission cables, but active contributors to the whole, with their own decision-making and processing capabilities. Fungi and plants are not simple stores or servers; they too are individual life forms with their own disposition and agency.

electrons are fired through two narrow slits and produce, not a scatter of single marks, as one would expect of discrete particles, but a continuous interference pattern, like a wave washing along a wall. By this method the ‘true’ quantum nature of the electron is revealed: not as a fixed, inviolable entity, but as a state of possibility, a scintillating intra-action.

The quantum field which permeates everything isn’t something tiny, something beneath everything else; rather, it is behind, in front, around, and entangled with the universe at every scale, right up to and exceeding our own bodies. We live in this shifting, vibrating, scintillating field, even if we are not conscious of it. 3

was left with the sense that while I would never really understand quantum physics, I could be certain of its truth and existence, and that its truth subsisted in this relationship: between the macro and the micro, the world and the subject, the story and the storyteller, the electron and its interference pattern.

Science, it struck me then, is a guide to thinking, not a thought: an endless process of becoming.

the more-than-human world is messy. It’s complex, uneven, entangled and lacking in clear breaks, borders or divisions. And it has always been this way.

which teemed with strange and novel creatures. Halobacteria and Archaea, families of single-celled organisms without nuclei or cell walls, lived suspended in the salty waters. Among these weird critters were Acidophilic Thermoplasmata, capable of enduring pH levels as low as 0.06; Archaeoglobi, which consume sulphur, iron and hydrogen for food; methane-ingesting bacteria; and other organisms found only in the depths of airless bogs, or the dark, deep ocean. Places which kill most animals in minutes or seconds provide rich breeding grounds for stranger forms of life.

It seems that there was a long period in which chimpanzees and early hominids–some of them our ancestors–continued to hybridize; that is, there was no clean species break, but rather a gradual and drawn-out speciation process, lasting as much as 4 million years, in which populations mingled and exchanged genes. 8 In fact, it seems likely that such ‘messy speciation’ was the way most apes (and other species) evolved, and goes some way to explaining the proliferation of possible human ancestors still being discovered across Africa and Eurasia.

to think of them as precursors is to fall into the same trap as we did with intelligence: to consider the end of the current branch to be the highest expression of the tree. For most of our history, we lived alongside other human species. We even had sex with them.

Stalactites and stalagmites are microcosms of geological processes. They accrete slowly but inexorably, layer by layer, over millennia, as mineral-rich waters seep down through fissures in the rock and drip from cave ceilings onto the floor. They trap and reveal the state of the atmosphere at the time of each layer, and so can be compared to other sources of ancient climate data, such as ice cores from Greenland. This allows them to be dated with great accuracy, and far further back in time than carbon dating permits.

What survives in the Bruniquel cave is pre-human architecture: unequivocal evidence of another, clearly intelligent, hominid species, which long preceded us.

The discovery of Göbekli Tepe, like that of Bruniquel, overturns everything we thought we knew about prehistory. Until this point, it was believed that early humans–pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer bands–had no significant architecture, little complex social organization and even less culture. The official timeline held that only after the development of agriculture around 10,000 years ago, and the accumulation of wealth and hierarchy that followed it, did we acquire the skills, time or inclination to construct such edifices. But Göbekli Tepe is at least 12,000 years old: the temple predates the city. Complex culture, architecture and spiritual beliefs are not as modern as we have believed them to be. We know this scientifically because we have dug up the temples, found the stones and dated the rings of stalactites, but we might also know it through a more-than-human sensitivity, which neither supersedes, nor is invalidated by, scientific understanding. Our archaeological beliefs and prejudices are artefacts of material persistence and techniques of analysis; but we have other ways of seeing we can bring to bear as we try to comprehend the awesome discovery at Göbekli Tepe. We have our own experience of living in the world, a world we share with our fellow human ancestors, archaic humans and other-than-human beings.

something strange about the Neanderthal DNA. As expected, some of it was similar to human DNA–we come, after all, from common ancestors. But a significant proportion of it was common only to some humans, specifically those of European and Asian descent, and was much less common in people of African descent.

Only one conclusion is possible: before the Neanderthals died out, Homo sapiens had sex with them, and their children peopled Europe, Asia and the Americas. We are the result, not of the linear descent of fixed immutable species, but of intermingling and interbreeding. The branches of the tree of life are intertwined with one another.

Modern inhabitants of Papua New Guinea and other Pacific islands share around 5 per cent of their genes with Denisovan predecessors, while East and South Asians share around 0.2 per cent. For a while, we thought this meant that the Denisovans had migrated northwards into Asia, but it seems more likely to be evidence of at least two distinct waves of migration–and two distinct periods in which humans and Denisovans were entangled, socially and sexually, with one another. 19

We are made from our entanglements with others.

What we perceive as borders and conflicts–the things which separate us–often turn out not to be artefacts of the exterior world, but immeasurable gaps in our own conceptions, abilities and tools of discernment. We think we are studying the world–but in reality we are merely making evident the limits of our own thinking, which are embodied in our logbooks and measuring instruments. The truth is always stranger, more lively and more expansive than anything we can compute.

the more accurately you try to measure some things, the more complex they become. This surprising observation has become known as the Richardson effect.

as we unravel the web of life, the result is not an ordered tree, with measurable branches and clear delineations between forms and types, but a whirling dance of encounters and interrelationships.

This is what the close scrutiny enabled by our technology actually reveals: not a rigid map, but a pattern of interference, all the way down to the quantum dance of the energy field behind everything.

The ribosomes are 3D printers for living bodies.

The human microbiome, the two kilograms or so of bacteria and other organisms that we carry around with us–mostly in our gut–profoundly influences our awareness and behaviour.

Not only are we the products of multiple entangled ancestors, spanning vast ranges of the evolutionary field; we are not even individuals at all. Rather, we are walking assemblages: riotous communities of multi-species, multi-bodied beings, inside and outside of our very cells.

Lynn Margulis, who considered the human individual ‘a kind of baroque edifice’, reconstructed every couple of decades by fusing and mutating bacteria.

‘Our strong sense of difference from any other life-form, our sense of species superiority’, wrote Margulis, ‘is a delusion of grandeur.’ 34

While mathematical models of networks have proved useful tools for understanding the structures and affordances of artificial and natural webs, from the internet to mycorrhiza, they are no match for metaphors, the actual mental models we carry around in our heads, sometimes only in fragments or sometimes consciously. These are the ideas we actually live by. And there can be no more powerful emergent metaphor than the one we have applied to the global, interconnected sensorium of the internet, the shared umwelt that we call the Cloud. The Cloud embodies and enacts all the conflicts of understanding we encounter in our attempts to understand the more-than-human world. It shows us, every day, that an information regime–a way of thinking and classifying the world–which depends upon fixed data and unbreakable categories, on conclusions over processes, ends over means, on biases and assumptions rather than the evidence of our own lives, is antithetical to society, humankind and life itself. No schema is ever complete, no taxonomy ever finished–and that’s fine, providing the systems we put in place for interpreting and applying those schemas are open, transparent, comprehensible and renegotiable.

this is our problem. We humans live in such a narrow slice of time and space that we are incapable of thinking of, or thinking at, the pace and scale of the world, the changes we have wrought in it, and the changes we will have to make to survive them. Our given minds are insufficient to the task–but we do have tools to hand, technology among them.

Circumnutation–a gentle upward and outward spiralling–is the characteristic movement of growing plants, performed by everything from pea shoots to oak seedlings, as well as mushrooms and the hyphae of fungi.

nutation remains central to a true understanding of plant life: a mode of expansion which is not reactive, muscular, and domineering, but gentle, expansive and generative. It is through their own attentiveness to their environment that plants have obtained the world.

We thoughtlessly assume that by observing the world, we fix it into knowable forms, but time-lapse reveals that the nature of the world is changeable. As Karen Barad, the philosopher of quantum physics, would say, it’s made of intra-actions: it’s in the invisible gaps between the frames that things encounter one another and vibrate. It is these intra-active processes of growth, change and decay which produce the lines between Darwin’s dotted points, and the dust which Duchamp varnished onto The Large Glass: shadows of unseen processes which exist in other dimensions of time.

Our intent–the way we choose to look–informs what we see. This problem is compounded by our technologies, particularly when they originate in war and violence, as most of our contemporary technologies do. The internet is a clear example of this: it emerged from the twin poles of Cold War paranoia–distributed networks designed to withstand atomic attack and the Californian Ideology, which in the 1990s traded the hippy ideals of liberation and togetherness for technological determinism and neoliberal capitalism. 21 It’s this combination of military power and corporate profit-seeking which has shaped the modern internet, writing structural violence and surveillance capitalism into its source code.

the computational environment is continuous with the natural one. Just as there is no clean break between humans and the biosphere, between the languages of the world and human languages, so there is a continual back-and-forth between the world and machines.

This continuity between technology, the body and the biosphere–this ecology–is perceptible in language, as it is in culture, sociality and our relationships with one another and the more-than-human world.

The first computer time-sharing system, developed at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire in 1964,

lack of control is precisely the thing we need to learn to accept if we are to live meaningfully and with justice among complex natural and technological systems.