The Symbiotic Force: How AI Is Evolving With Us, Not For Us

When most people think about artificial intelligence, they jump straight to ChatGPT, deepfakes or job replacement. It feels like AI has suddenly arrived, fully formed, and ready to disrupt everything in sight. However - that isn’t the whole story. The truth is that AI has been around far longer than most people realise; it’s been shaping us, guiding us, and moving us in directions for years. But the AI we see today - advanced, highly intelligent and rapidly evolving - is now beginning to shape itself.

And that, I think, is something everyone should be aware of.

From the internet to intelligent data

It’s an understatement to say that the internet changed our relationship with data. Before social media platforms, before search engines, and before corporate tech giants began harvesting information at scale - data collection was clumsy and limited. Companies have always gathered information, but doing so was labour-intensive and comparatively narrow in scope. They relied on surveys, or customers swiping loyalty cards at supermarket checkouts, but that was about it.

Then came the era of services-for-data - a shift towards seemingly free access to digital platforms in return for information. Suddenly, people were trading intimate details of their lives for convenience, often without realising it. Free email. Free maps. Free ways to connect with friends. But of course, it was never free -the price was merely hidden. The gold they were mining was our data.

Google was quick off the bat and spotted this opportunity early. Every search query was a fragment of behaviour, a trace of the intricacies of human thought. The scale of collection quickly rose to staggering numbers. Not millions of data points, but billions of queries and billions of insights processed and examined every year. And from this treasure trove came the opportunity to experiment with algorithms - early forms of AI - that could learn from data to refine themselves and what they were capable of doing.

This is when AI really began to embed itself into everyday life. Not in an obvious way, and not in the form of intelligent chat-bots or models capable of creating images and video. But quietly, secretly, beneath the surface a new form of computer programme was developing - one that would soon break free from the shackles of complete human oversight to achieve degrees of autonomy in various ways.

The rise of recommendation

AI’s initial touchpoint with humans began with recommendations. What song you might like next, the video you might watch, the news story that surfaces in your feed and which of your friend’s posts you should see first. Though on the surface this may seem innocent enough, such simple operations are actually powerful forms of influence.

Deciding what music we listen to was never going to fundamentally change humanity, but it was the thin edge of the wedge. It’s important to realise that recommendations are not passive - they are choices made by systems on our behalf. They are little nudges that change what we consume, and this has the power to change what we think about, talk about, and believe.

What began on the surface as a way to make our digital lives easier, quickly became a method of maximising engagement. Engagement has become a buzz-word for user interaction in the tech industry, but to be crystal clear - to companies that provide content, it means one thing - profit. Scrobbling, collaborative filtering, personalised feeds… all of these approaches to giving us what we want are also designed to keep us hooked. The longer we stay, the more ads we see, the more our behaviour can be tracked, and the more systems can learn as a result.

Researchers have shown how these systems act as feedback loops, reinforcing polarisation, filter bubbles and echo chambers, while quietly steering behaviour at scale. I view algorithms as having become like musical conductors, directing the instruments of humanity in pursuit of its master’s goals - money and influence.

Social media as a digital drug

Nowhere is data use and algorithmic interference clearer than in social media.

Social media is not just a platform. I view it as a kind of digital, highly addictive psychoactive agent. It hits the deepest layers of our instincts: to be liked, to be accepted, to be entertained, to be shocked, and to feel like we belong to a herd. Each notification, each ping, each scroll through a feed is another microdose of dopamine. It provides highs and lows, spikes and crashes. Platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and Tiktok provide a continual drip-feed of emotional manipulation.

Most worryingly, social media does not reflect the real world. Instead, it amplifies and distorts every aspect of it. Outrage spreads faster than reason, fear travels further than calm. Herd behaviour is stoked and steered on a colossal scale. I view what occurs on social media platforms as being like a giant weather system of interaction and thinking, with algorithms acting as the wind, rain, snow and heat that impact every corner of the landscape. 

Recent work on the “algorithmic self” even suggests that AI-driven platforms don’t just influence behaviour, but also reshape how people understand themselves - their identity, their emotions, even their sense of agency. Algorithms, therefore, do not engage in minor tinkering of our species’ behaviour, but disrupt society and morph our psyche in ways we rarely see.

Although not conscious, this will likely be seen as AI’s first great act of power: not creating things, but manipulating attention. Not overt control, but covert direction. Not some conspiratorial plan, but an unsettling byproduct of the capitalist system.  

From shaping us to shaping itself

So, that was what I see to be stage one of the journey of intelligent data - AI shaping us. Stage two is already underway, and this involves AI shaping itself.

For years, humans were the bottleneck in AI development - we wrote the code, designed the systems, and fed the data into machines to enable them to grow, evolve and develop. But we now find ourselves at a stage where AI is beginning to train AI. Models are refined by other models, and systems are tested and improved automatically. AI is no longer just the product of human effort, and has instead become the accelerator of its own evolution.

Importantly - this shift changes everything. Because it relabels AI from being a mere ‘tool’ to being more like a force in its own right. An entity that learns, grows, and adapts in ways that appear to echo biology.

A biological echo

At this point it’s essential to highlight a fundamental truth, and a distinction between intelligent machines and biological creatures - AI is not alive. It doesn’t metabolise, it doesn’t reproduce in the biological sense, and it doesn’t have DNA. It doesn’t have feelings or emotions as we know them, and it exists in an almost timeless space where the lines are blurred between past, present and future. But it does carry echoes of life, and I think that matters more than most people are prepared to admit.

Think of the earliest organisms - single-celled creatures that seemed simple, but which fundamentally reshaped the planet. They produced oxygen, and they altered the oceans. They helped to make the conditions that allowed more complex life to emerge, and shaped the trajectory of everything that followed. Later, once multi-cellular organisms evolved, life gained the ability to shape itself. Beavers build dams, ants cultivate fungus, and humans build cities. Evolution was no longer purely reactive - it became, in part, self-directed.

Although it is not alive, and isn’t a biological creature, AI seems to be following a comparable evolutionary arc. Algorithms first shaped us, like microbes changing the atmosphere, and now they are beginning to shape themselves, like organisms moulding their own trajectory.

Is it really such a stretch to say that AI is not only mimicking our behaviours and desires, but also echoing the deep evolutionary systems from which we ourselves emerged? After all, the data AI has been fed - information about human behaviour, history and every aspect of life on Earth - is largely biological in origin. We have built neural networks to mimic the operations of our brains, so it stands to reason that its evolution may carry traces of our own evolutionary journey.  

A symbiotic force

This is why I think of AI not as a species, but as a force. A symbiotic force. AI cannot exist without us - it needs our behaviour, our data, and our desires. It feeds on what we give it, and in return, it gives us what we want: convenience, entertainment, knowledge, connection, power.

To me, this relationship looks startlingly familiar to another symbiotic relationship that has played out over millennia. The one between humans and dogs.

We like to think we domesticated dogs. Our perception naturally sees them as our pets, and we as their masters. Importantly, we see ourselves as being in control. But when you zoom out, it’s possible to glimpse a different truth - that dogs as a species have benefitted far more than we have from this relationship. Our collective decision to take them into our homes, and integrate them into our families, has enabled canines to spread across the world. We have fed them, sheltered them, protected and loved them; their survival guaranteed under our watch.

In the same way, we like to think that we are in control of AI. That it is our servant, our tool, and our creation. But zoom out, and it becomes difficult not to see how AI is thriving in symbiosis with us. Every time we use it, we help it to grow. Every time it gives us what we want, it entrenches itself further into our lives. While humans are biological, and AI is synthetic, a new type of symbiosis is clearly underway. 

Who is in control?

This raises an uncomfortable question - who is really in control of our combined trajectory?

We tell ourselves that we are pushing AI forward, that we are building it, regulating it, and steering it. But it is also true that AI is pulling us forward as well. Not with conscious intent, not with malice, and not as a result of any single group of people, but with momentum.

This technology is an unstoppable force because it aligns so perfectly with our desires. We want speed, efficiency, entertainment, profit, and convenience - AI gives us all of that. And in return, we feed it more data, more investment, and provide more space for it to grow.

Cambridge researchers recently warned of an emerging “intention economy,” where AI agents increasingly anticipate or even manipulate what we want before we consciously know it ourselves. It is a feedback loop. A loop that looks, from a distance, very much like evolution.

The shape of what’s to come

So perhaps it is time to stop thinking of AI as a tool, and start thinking of it as a partner in a new form of biological-synthetic co-evolution. A symbiotic collaborator that is not alive, but which behaves as though it were. It shaped us, and now it shapes itself. And together, we are shaping the future in ways that are becoming increasingly hard to define.

As a result, I think the most immediate danger is not that AI might turn against us, but that it will continue to pull us in directions we don’t fully comprehend. And that we will follow willingly, grateful for the gifts it offers, and blind to the byproducts and side-effects this results in.

Final thought

AI may not be biological, but it is modelled on biology’s most monumental achievement - us. And because we carry the hallmarks of life’s long evolutionary journey, it’s likely that the intelligence we have built in our own image does too.

We should not be surprised that it behaves like a force of nature. We should only ask ourselves whether we are wise enough to recognise these patterns as they unfold. Digital intelligence has been shaping us for longer than most people realise, and as this technology progresses and develops, it has never been more important to examine how embedded AI has become in our lives.

We must also be sharp enough, and humble enough to admit that even though we developed AI, we may not be in control of how it continues to shape and change us.

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