of computer scientists. “Many species are
at risk of local extinction because they
have no independent means to change
their financial value,” Ledgard explained.
The goal, he said, is to “pick a local spe-
cies that is threatened with extinction,
give it some financial agency in the world,
and then work out how the value that it
holds can be distributed to the local
human community.” He named the proj-
ect Linnaeus, for the Swedish botanist
who devised the taxonomic system.
“Why not kill the animal when you’re
hungry?” an engineer asked.
“Essentially, what you want is for these
communities to start realizing that they
have significant, positive financial value
from living next to a biodiverse area,”
Ledgard replied. “But to do that you
would have to provide more value than
they’re presently getting from short-term,
day-to-day activities, like cutting down
trees for charcoal,” or killing gorillas for
meat. If Linnaeus were implemented, he
explained, “very large numbers of hu-
mans would give small amounts of money
into a mechanism which then appor-
tions it hyperlocally, to species that need
it most”; as an endangered population
grew in health and number, so, too, would
the amount of money distributed to the
local human community.
“It’s crazy, but it might work,” an
Avast employee said.
“How committed are you, person-
ally, to this?” Vlcek, the C.E.O., asked.
“Oh, a hundred per cent!”
“So this is all you’re doing?”
“Well, eighty per cent,” Ledgard re-
plied. “My modus operandi is to think
of crazy ideas, and then to try to lift
them, in a very early stage.”
“A number of crazy ideas? Because
this one is crazy enough to keep you
busy for many years,” Vlcek said. “What’s
in it for you? Why are you doing this?”
“I don’t want to get to 2050, when
Elon Musk and his libertarian chums
are eating dog food on Mars, and then
for them to look back on Earth and see
that we’ve lost fifty per cent of our life-
forms,” Ledgard replied. “There’s a
significant minority—or maybe a ma-
jority—of human beings who are bio-
philiac. They like living things. And that
hasn’t been priced correctly.”
A few months later, Ledgard called
me to say that he had refined the con-
cept to focus on the promotion of in-
sect life on European farms. “Jonathan,
like all of us—his greatest strength is
also, paradoxically, his weakness,” Fos-
ter told me. “And that is his ability to
go from one great idea to another, and
to another, and to another.”I
n recent years, Ledgard’s fixations have
converged in the field of artificial in-
telligence. No other technological devel-
opment is likely to so dramatically ac-
celerate the future, especially if computer
scientists achieve what is known as “sin-
gularity”—the point at which an artifi-
cially intelligent network escapes human
control. Some futurists worry about ro-
bots taking over; Ledgard is more con-
cerned that artificial intelligence is being
crafted in the image of the modern cor-
porate élite, obsessed with the genera-
tion of capital and uninterested in the
natural world. “If you’re not recorded in
the book of data, then you cease to have
importance,” Ledgard explained.
Already, humans have accelerated the
rate of global species extinction by a fac-
tor of “tens or hundreds of times” more
than in the previous ten million years, ac-
cording to the United Nations. The bi-
ologist and theorist Edward O. Wilson
writes, in “Half Earth: Our Planet’s Fight
for Life,” from 2016, “Humanity is los-
ing the race between the scientific study
of global biodiversity and the oblitera-
tion of countless still unknown species.”
Yet the studies that have been car-
ried out make it clear that, in both the
digital and the natural realms, “there are
ways of seeing and ways of understand-
ing which are superior to the ways that
humans see and understand,” Ledgard
said. Wilson writes in another of his
books, “Consilience: The Unity of
Knowledge,” from 1998, that “we have
even uncovered basic senses entirely out-
side the human repertory. Where hu-
mans detect electricity only indirectly
by a tingling of skin or flash of light,
the electric fishes of Africa and South
America” transmit and receive electri-
cal signals through their skin. Butterflies
search for pollen by reading the pattern
of ultraviolet rays that are reflected off
petals; bats hunt by broadcasting ultra-
sonic pulses and reading the echoes that
bounce off the bodies of insects.
“If you look intensely at something,
it becomes magical, it attains an impor-
tance and a character,” Ledgard said. Asuperintelligent digital entity would be
able to look more intensely at every-
thing, and so it might develop a greater
awe of the intricacies of the natural world.
But it might also miss the mark, mor-
ally. As the Swedish philosopher Nick
Bostrom wrote, in his 2003 paper “Eth-
ical Issues in Advanced Artificial Intel-
ligence,” it “seems perfectly possible to
have a superintelligence whose sole goal
is something completely arbitrary, such
as to manufacture as many paperclips as
possible, and who would resist with all
its might any attempt to alter this goal.”
Or, if the Internet had its way, the su-
perintelligent entity might be taught to
prioritize the existence of cute animals,
like mice—which falcons eat—and thus
bring about extinction for falcons. “We
need to be careful about what we wish
for from a superintelligence, because we
might get it,” Bostrom writes.
Last year, Ledgard teamed up with
Federico Díaz, a Czech-Argentine con-
ceptual artist, to imagine how an artifi-
cially intelligent robot would conceive
of the natural world around it. On a long
walk, about fifteen miles outside Prague,
they spotted a wild boar tearing through
a farmer’s field. It struck Ledgard that
this ugly, stinking beast is exactly the
kind of creature that might be left out
of the digital future. “Wild boar live very
proximate to humans, but no one really
thinks about them much, except to kill
them,” Ledgard said between slurps of
pea soup, when we met in Prague. He
and Díaz started tracking a group of boar,
sleeping in a field among them. They
learned that wild boar dig circular pits
in the ground. “Fedé is a very romantic
guy—he had this idea that the boar were
looking for something existential,” Led-
gard told me. “This wafting smell of the
earth, this energy—that they’re looking
out to the stars and digging around. Then
we spoke to the gamekeeper, and he said,
‘What? No, they’re in it for meat. They
want worms and mice.’”
Ledgard and Díaz intend to create an
immersive art exhibit where visitors would
become disoriented by shifting perspec-
tives—between that of the boar and that
of the machine intelligence—and begin
to question the human tendency to rely
on visual sight over the other senses. To
Ledgard, collaboration with artists is as
urgent as that with scientists. “The ques-
tions that various artists have been ask-40 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019