The Original AI: Animate Intelligence

The Intelligence That Was Already Here

Shantree Kacera, RH, DN, Ph.D.

“The future may depend less on making machines more intelligent, and more on remembering the intelligence of life.”

There is so much conversation these days about Artificial Intelligence that I find myself thinking about another kind of intelligence, one that has been here all along. It is so ordinary and so close to us that perhaps we no longer notice it. We walk through it, eat it, breathe it and depend upon it every moment of our lives. It is the intelligence that organizes the living world. I have come to think of it as Animate Intelligence, the original AI.

I have spent much of my life growing plants, working with herbs and food, and walking through forests, fields and wetlands. After all these years, I still find it remarkable that I can hold a seed between my fingers that appears dry and almost lifeless, place it into the soil, give it moisture and warmth, and watch something begin. There is a period when nothing appears to be happening. Then the seed swells, the covering breaks, a root begins its journey downward while a shoot finds its way toward the light. Within that tiny seed are the beginnings of an architecture that may eventually stand many metres high or spread itself across a field.

Nobody tells the root where to go. Nobody instructs the first leaves when to open.

Of course, science can describe a great deal of what is happening. We know about hormones, enzymes, gene expression, cellular signalling and the plant's responses to gravity, moisture, temperature and light. I value this knowledge enormously. But knowing the mechanisms has never diminished the mystery for me. If anything, the closer we look, the more extraordinary the whole process becomes. We can give names to what is happening and still be left with the much larger question of how living matter acquired such an astonishing capacity to sense conditions, respond to them and organize itself.

Charles Darwin was fascinated by this. Near the end of The Power of Movement in Plants, published with his son Francis in 1880, he made the remarkable comparison that the root tip acts “like the brain of one of the lower animals.” He was not suggesting that a plant possesses a brain as an animal does. He was drawing attention to the ability of the root tip to receive impressions and influence movement in other parts of the root.

More than a century later, we know that plants are sensing far more of their surroundings than Darwin could have known. They respond to gravity, light, temperature, moisture, touch, chemical compounds, damage and other organisms. They continually alter their growth and physiology according to what they encounter.

The plant has not suddenly become intelligent because science discovered these things.

It was doing them all along.

Intelligence Without a Brain

The longer I have lived close to plants, the less comfortable I have become with the assumption that intelligence must begin with a brain. Understandably, we arrived there. Human intelligence is the form we know most intimately, so we have built our definitions around reasoning, language, memory, calculation and conscious choice. But life was sensing and responding to its surroundings for an immense period of evolutionary history before brains appeared.

I am not suggesting that a maple tree sits in the forest thinking about tomorrow's weather or that a root consciously decides to turn toward moisture. I think we weaken the argument when we try to make plants into little versions of ourselves. What interests me is almost the opposite. Plants show us that there may be forms of biological responsiveness and problem-solving that look nothing like human thought.

Plant scientist Anthony Trewavas has spent decades exploring this territory. In discussing plant behaviour, he has written that “plants are typically self-organizing individuals.” I find the phrase useful because it shifts attention away from the question of whether a plant “thinks” and toward the more interesting question of how it organizes itself.

There is no command centre inside a tree telling every cell what to do. Roots encounter different conditions and respond locally. Leaves adjust themselves according to light and water. Chemical signals move through tissues. Growth changes after damage. A plant under attack can alter its chemistry. Roots encounter rocks, dry areas, nutrients, competing roots, microorganisms and fungi, and their growth reflects those encounters. The whole organism emerges from enormous numbers of interactions taking place at once.

A plant cannot walk away when conditions become difficult. Its intelligence, if we choose to use that word, has had to take another form.

Perhaps one reason we have underestimated plants is simply speed. Human beings are impressed by things that happen on our timescale. Watch a plant for five minutes and not much seems to happen. Watch it through spring, summer, autumn and winter and another world appears. Buds swell, leaves orient themselves, roots extend, flowers emerge, fruits ripen, seeds disperse, and the whole organism continually adjusts itself to changing conditions.

What looks like stillness may simply be life moving at a different pace.

A Forest Is Made of Relationships

One of the things I enjoy doing is stopping in the forest and looking closely at a very small area. You don't need a dramatic landscape or an untouched wilderness. A fallen tree will do.

At first it is simply an old piece of wood lying on the ground. Look again and you begin to notice that the tree has entered another stage of participation in the forest. Moss spreads across its surface. Fungi penetrate the wood. Beetles and other small creatures make homes within it. Moisture is retained beneath the bark and in the softening wood. Microorganisms participate in its decomposition. Seeds may eventually germinate on it. Over years, sometimes decades, what once stood upright in the canopy becomes part of the forest floor.

I have always found this remarkable because our culture tends to draw a hard line between living and dead, useful and useless. A forest is not so tidy. The fallen tree is dead as a tree, certainly, but it has not become ecologically irrelevant. Its role has changed.

Beneath it, another world is unfolding.

Most terrestrial plants form relationships with mycorrhizal fungi. Fungal threads interact intimately with plant roots, participating in exchanges involving mineral nutrients and plant-derived carbon. Around these relationships are bacteria, other fungi, tiny animals, water, air, minerals and decomposing organic matter. A handful of healthy soil is not simply material holding a plant upright. It is habitat.

There has been a great deal of popular discussion about the “wood-wide web,” sometimes describing trees as though they were deliberately sending messages and food to one another through an underground internet. The science is more complicated than the metaphor. Researchers continue to investigate how common mycorrhizal networks function and how important different forms of transfer and signalling are under natural conditions. I don't think we need to exaggerate any of it. The reality is astonishing enough: much of what happens above ground depends upon relationships occurring below ground that were almost invisible to us until relatively recently.

The more carefully I look at living systems, the harder it becomes to find anything living entirely by itself.

A flower makes sense in relationship with its pollinators. A tree exists in relationship with soil, fungi, microorganisms, rainfall, sunlight and atmosphere. An animal carries an entire microbial community within it. Rivers shape forests, and forests influence the movement of water. The oxygen entering our lungs has been profoundly shaped by the history of photosynthetic life on Earth.

Robin Wall Kimmerer expresses this interdependence beautifully:

“All flourishing is mutual.”

Those four words challenge one of the stories our culture has told itself about nature. We have often emphasized competition, and competition is certainly real. Nature is not endlessly cooperative or gentle. Organisms consume one another. Plants compete for light. Animals defend territory. Droughts kill. Fires transform entire landscapes.

But that is not the whole story.

Life also depends upon pollination, symbiosis, decomposition, microbial communities, nutrient exchange and countless forms of reciprocity. The forest is simultaneously competitive and cooperative. Its resilience comes partly from the density and diversity of its relationships.

This has led me to wonder whether some forms of intelligence may exist not only within organisms but between them.

Artificial Intelligence Meets Animate Intelligence

This is where our fascination with Artificial Intelligence becomes especially interesting to me. I use AI. I am curious about it. I can already see extraordinary possibilities in its ability to work with enormous quantities of information, recognize patterns and make connections that would take a human being years to discover.

What concerns me is not Artificial Intelligence itself. It is the possibility that we become so impressed with it that we fail to recognize the intelligence of the living world from which we created it.

A computer can describe photosynthesis in exquisite detail. A plant photosynthesizes.

Artificial Intelligence can analyze every known chemical constituent of a strawberry. A strawberry plant takes water, minerals, carbon dioxide and sunlight and produces something fragrant, colourful and nourishing that also happens to carry the possibility of another generation.

One is an extraordinary accomplishment of human technology. The other is an extraordinary accomplishment of life.

I don't see a need to diminish either.

In fact, what excites me most is the possibility of bringing the two together. Artificial Intelligence can examine satellite images across enormous landscapes, recognize changes in vegetation, follow patterns of drought, analyze biodiversity data and detect relationships within ecological systems that no single researcher could hold in mind. Used wisely, this technology could become a new way of seeing.

Imagine what that might mean for a watershed. Thousands of measurements involving rainfall, soil moisture, vegetation, groundwater, agricultural practices, temperature, biodiversity and stream flow could be considered together rather than separately. Similar approaches could help us understand forests, food systems, migration patterns, declining species and changes occurring in soils.

Perhaps Artificial Intelligence could help us perceive Animate Intelligence at scales our unaided senses cannot.

The Intelligence We Are Losing

There is a contradiction in our present moment that I find difficult to ignore. At precisely the time when we are investing extraordinary amounts of money, energy and human ingenuity into creating increasingly sophisticated Artificial Intelligence, we are dismantling some of the most sophisticated living systems on Earth.

A mature forest can disappear in days. A wetland that developed over centuries can be drained. Soil built slowly through the interaction of roots, fungi, microorganisms, minerals, water and decaying organic matter can lose its fertility within generations. Species carrying millions of years of evolutionary history can disappear permanently.

Usually we describe this as environmental degradation or biodiversity loss. Those terms are accurate, but they can also sound strangely abstract.

Something else is being lost.

Every species represents a particular way life has discovered to survive in a particular set of circumstances. Within its biology is the result of an evolutionary experiment extending far beyond human history. Every ecosystem contains relationships that no human being designed and that we still understand only partially.

When a species disappears, we lose more than an organism. We lose a particular participant in a much larger web of relationships.

When an old forest disappears, we do not simply lose a collection of trees. We lose relationships among trees of different ages, fungi, insects, birds, mammals, microorganisms, soils, water and climate that developed over long periods of time.

Seen this way, protecting biodiversity is not simply about preserving beautiful places. It is also about preserving a vast living library whose language we have only begun to read.

What Kind of Intelligence Will We Become?

Human beings are unquestionably clever. We have split atoms, altered genes, crossed oceans in hours, built cities visible from space and created machines capable of processing quantities of information no individual human mind could hold.

But I am no longer convinced that cleverness and intelligence are necessarily the same thing.

A species capable of reaching another planet while destroying the soil from which it eats presents us with a strange definition of progress.

After more than half a century of growing plants and observing living systems, I find myself returning to this distinction more often. A forest doesn't have to remain unchanged to endure. Trees fall. Fires occur. Insects consume leaves. Storms tear branches away. Drought transforms landscapes. Nature is not the gentle, perfectly harmonious world we sometimes imagine it to be.

And yet life reorganizes.

That capacity for regeneration may be one of the forms of intelligence we most urgently need to understand. Living systems cycle materials. Diversity provides options when conditions change. What dies becomes available to other forms of life. Relationships shift after disturbance. New patterns emerge. Life does not return everything to exactly what it was before; it finds another way forward.

Our industrial systems have largely been built on a different pattern. We extract, manufacture, consume and discard. We call the discarded material waste, although in living systems the idea of waste is much harder to find. One organism's discarded material becomes another organism's opportunity.

What would happen if Artificial Intelligence helped us become better at understanding these patterns rather than simply making our existing patterns more efficient?

It might help agriculture become more attentive to soil ecology rather than treating soil primarily as a medium into which nutrients are added. It could help communities understand watersheds as living systems rather than merely sources of water. It might help us recognize ecological thresholds before we cross them, design materials that remain in circulation, restore degraded landscapes and understand which relationships make ecosystems resilient in the face of change.

This is where I see a much more meaningful future for AI.

Artificial Intelligence does not have to compete with Animate Intelligence. One could help us understand the other.

The original AI is still around us, quietly doing what it has been doing for billions of years. It is in the seed responding to moisture and warmth, in the tree adjusting its growth to light, in fungi exploring the soil, in birds crossing continents, in microorganisms transforming yesterday's leaves into tomorrow's fertility, and in the endless exchanges among atmosphere, water, mineral, plant and animal.

Artificial Intelligence may become one of the most powerful technologies our species has ever created. Animate Intelligence has had a considerable head start.

So when I hear people asking, How intelligent will Artificial Intelligence become?, I find myself wondering whether we are asking the more important question.

How intelligent will we become?

Will we use these extraordinary tools simply to accelerate what we are already doing, or could they help us finally see more clearly the living systems upon which everything we have built depends?

I suspect the most important meeting between Artificial Intelligence and Animate Intelligence will be the moment when we become wise enough to place one in service to the other.

After all these years, my deepest sense of wonder still lies there. Not in watching a machine become more like life, remarkable as that may be, but in life itself and in how much we have yet to understand about the intelligence that was here long before us.

“The oldest intelligence on Earth has never stopped speaking. The question is whether we still know how to listen.”