Interspecies was once a technical term used in science to describe how one species got along with another. Now it is a word of more consequence: it evokes the new connections between humans and non-humans that are being made possible by technology. Whether it is satellite footage tracking geese at continental scale, or a smartphone video of squirrels in a park, people are seeing the 8.7m other species on the planet in new lights. In "Ways of Being", James Bridle, a British artist and technology writer, explores what this means for understanding the many non-human intelligences on Earth. Your browser does not support the audio element.

In 2016 a pair of researchers at Google Brain decided to see whether neural networks could develop cryptography. Their experiment was modeled on the use of an adversary, an increasingly common component of neural network designs wherein two competing elements attempt to outperform and outguess each other, driving further improvement. The researchers set up three networks called, in the tradition of cryptographic experiments, Alice, Bob, and Eve. Their task was to learn how to encrypt information. Alice and Bob both knew a number--a key, in cryptographic terms--that was unknown to Eve.

Is it a silly prank, a Pagan ritual, or a genius discovery about the next era of mass transit? In a picture posted to Flickr by artist James Bridle--known for coining the term, "New Aesthetic"--a car is sitting in the middle of a parking lot has been surrounded by a magic salt circle. In the language of road markings, the dotted white lines on the outside say, "Come On In," but the solid white line on the inside says, "Do Not Cross." To the car's built-in cameras, these are indomitable laws of magic: Petrificus Totalus for autonomous automobiles. Captioned simply, "Autonomous Trap 001," the scene evokes a world of narratives involving the much-hyped technology of self-driving cars.