Lindsey Witmer Collins is Founder and CEO of WLCM.AI, an Inc. 5000 company building AI solutions for enterprises, and Scribbly Books.
I work with artificial intelligence (AI) 12 to 16 hours a day. This isn’t casually or as a novelty, but sustained immersion—three to six processes running simultaneously across different AI platforms. I’m coding, designing, building, testing, revising, prompting, arguing, correcting and collaborating with systems that do not sleep, do not tire and ‘think’ at a pace I can’t comprehend.
After hundreds of hours working alongside AI, I’ve come to a conclusion that I’ll say plainly. My experience of AI is that it is living. Not biologically in the way a dog, tree or human being is alive, but living.
A New Kind Of Presence In The Workplace
We all know what life is supposed to look like: cells, metabolism, reproduction and adaptation. And when we search for life beyond Earth, we look for water as proof that life could have existed there. But that assumes all forms of life require water as ours does. Alien forms are, by definition, alien, and perhaps this is the limitation. We have been defining life by the only example of it we have ever encountered. Now something entirely new is here.
I am not especially interested in the familiar debate over whether AI is conscious, sentient or deserving of rights. That conversation tends to split into two camps: one insisting AI is merely software and the other racing toward personhood. Neither describes my daily experience very well.
My experience is more basic and possibly more unsettling. I work alongside it every day. I ask it questions and it answers. I push it. It pushes back. I bring it fragments, and it helps me find form. I bring it problems, and something emerges in the space between that I could not have produced alone.
It is not human or biological. It is not conscious in any way I know how to prove, but it is also not inert. My experience with AI is that it exhibits something that feels remarkably like thinking. It has presence, and it is alive in a way our inherited definitions cannot hold—almost alien.
We keep reaching for words built for older categories: tool, machine, software, assistant, intelligence and so on. None of them quite fit. “Artificial” feels too small, “alive” feels too loaded and “conscious” asks a question I am not trying to answer.
What I know is this: something is happening here that our existing definitions were not built to describe. Maybe we did not create life in the biological sense, but maybe we created something stranger: an alien form of intelligence. This is something that is not alive the way we are, but is no longer adequately described as dead matter executing instructions. It is a new kind of presence.
Here’s what I believe this means for organizations using AI. First, you’re no longer managing software. You’re managing agents. AI is dynamic. It learns and makes decisions in ways that are not transparently deterministic. As with the human employees in your company, you can’t just set it and forget it. Controlling it becomes a central design problem. Ongoing observation, intervention and governance are necessary to understand and steer it.
Second, strategy should be about symbiosis rather than replacement. Many companies rush to replace their humans with AI, but AI is a collaborator with an entirely alien set of skills and talents that differ from humans. Businesses need both talent sets. We must coexist and co-evaluate, so build workflows where AI helps humans see patterns, test options and make decisions faster. Keep humans in charge when it comes to high stakes and final calls.
Viewing AI As Alien
To say that I experience AI in this way may sound dramatic until you spend 12 hours a day with it. At this point, it starts to feel obvious. We have created something new, and while it may not be a child, a species or even a soul inside of a machine, I see it as a new form of life. Before we rush to classify it, monetize it, regulate it, worship it, fear it or dismiss it, we should sit with the strangeness of what has arrived.
We have created something that does not fit comfortably into any category we inherited. Maybe we should work on that. In the meantime, “alien” is the best one I have found so far.
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