THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019 41
ing—maybe forever!—are really funda-
mental questions, which machine-intel-
ligence engineers are only just beginning
to ask themselves,” he said. “What is it
to have a body? What is it to have a sense
of touch? How are you orientated in
space?” Ledgard and Díaz concede the
impossibility of the task at hand. “We
know something about boars through
videos and books, hunters and zoolo-
gists,” Díaz said. “But I am like a child—I
know nothing about the language of the
boars. And then, if we are talking about
A.I., we are in prenatal times.”
“We are two humans trying to imag-
ine what is a boar, and what is machine
intelligence, and how would they think
about each other,” Ledgard said. The
theme echoes Ledgard’s first novel, “Gi-
raffe,” from 2006, which is partly writ-
ten from the perspective of a Kenyan
giraffe, which ends up being killed in
Czechoslovak captivity during the So-
viet era. “We know that what we are
doing is stupid and forlorn. But we also
know that it’s important and beautiful.”
Díaz objected: “I wouldn’t say stupid,
I would say naïve.”
“Naïve—better word,” Ledgard agreed.
“It’s this idea that maybe—and weirdly—
in 2060 the machine intelligence will look
back and say, ‘Oh, this was one of the
first very, very clumsy, naïve attempts to
think of what I might think about!’”
T
hat night, Ledgard and I drove a
half hour southwest, to a village
called Mezouň. It was nine o’clock, and
Díaz had arranged for a local hunter, a
large, middle-aged Czech named Mar-
tin, to lead us into the woods.
Martin parked at the edge of a small
field, thick with weeds. It was surrounded
by forest but close enough to the high-
way that you could hear the sounds of
passing cars. “When we started this proj-
ect, we were trying to escape the human
element,” Ledgard said. “But we’ve come
to really appreciate that humans have
meshed the entire world. Here is an an-
imal that lives around us. It’s not domes-
tic, but it’s not truly wild, either.” Against
the night sky—which showed the lights
in Prague—you could make out the black
silhouette of a wooden hunting tower.
“There is a group of thirty to forty
boar that lives in this patch of forest,”
Martin explained. He gestured toward
the tower, adding, “I killed one this morn-
ing, at seven o’clock.” Then he climbed
into his truck and drove off.
Dead leaves and acorns tumbled
through the crisp autumn air. Ledgard
and Díaz climbed the hunting tower, but
after a few minutes Díaz insisted that
they leave. “I think we will not see any-
thing, because we are in the spot of the
shooter,” he said, and the boar would be
mourning Martin’s kill.
Ledgard got down, and began traips-
ing through the forest, leaving Díaz be-
hind. He came across muddy pits where
the boar had foraged for mice and acorns,
and parts of trees whose bark had been
rubbed off by boar. “Boy, that’s a strong
smell,” he said. “Sweat, berries, mice, rot-
ting acorns, shit.”
There was the yellow glint of an eye,
roughly forty feet away. A large female
boar stared at Ledgard for a few seconds,
then turned, snuffling, and darted off.
After a few minutes of silence, at least a
dozen boar rustled past, very close, hid-
den amid the darkness and the trees. “If
you see them, it’s about you,” Ledgard
whispered. “But if you can just smell and
hear them it’s about them.”
This was quintessential Ledgard: in-
quisitive, strange, striving for stillness
and invisibility—the better to spend
time among aggressive and skittish crea-
tures, and make sense of them to amostly incurious world. I had come to
think of him as a man who probably
won’t save the planet but at least has
the audacity to try.
Ledgard and I returned to the car
close to midnight. We were covered to
the ankles with boar droppings. We drove
with the windows down, and stopped
at a gas station, on the outskirts of Prague,
where we took turns blasting our feet
with a power washer. “The closer you
get, the harder you try to see the boar
as a creature, the more you realize that
you don’t have the empathy to do so,”
Ledgard said, laughing.
In his darkest moments, Ledgard has
the “somewhat creepy” fantasy that ad-
vances in artificial intelligence may ac-
tually serve as a kind of evolutionary cor-
rection to the depredations of humanity.
The best hope for the natural world might
look something like Nick Bostrom’s pa-
per-clip problem, but morally intact: that
before we render the earth completely un-
inhabitable we will create a superintelli-
gent entity that recognizes the value of
life itself, and so begins to ruthlessly pri-
oritize the preservation of life in its most
essential forms—the microbes, the fungi,
the flora, the jellies and salps pulsing in
the oceans’ blackest deep. A digital in-
tervention to mitigate the Anthropocene.
Another chance for earth, without us.