Norman Jackson
We are approaching the spring equinox and I spent the afternoon in a small, ancient woodland near my home. It was mild and the air was full of light and the sound of birds. For a moment a pair of red kites hunting, wheeled over my head — their distinctive call mingling with the sound of a woodpecker hammering on a tree. Underfoot the ground was spongy; I occasionally sank into wet patches — it has rained a lot recently.
Fallen logs and much of the ground was covered in vivid green moss, and vivid green dog mercury was sprouting everywhere. In one corner a cloud of white blossom on blackthorn filled my eyes.
Everywhere I looked was life.
I set to work stacking fallen branches into brushwood piles. I used my small chain saw to cut thicker branches. I used the bigger logs to create an edge to the path — curving it into a sinuous form that I found appealing — before fetching barrows of wood chip to overlay on boggy ground. I raked the soil close to the edge of the path and scattered some wildflower seeds: a woodland mix that thrives in shade.
I dug two holes and planted two Rowan saplings. I collected seeds from under sycamore and hazel trees and scattered them in a space where some dying ash trees had been felled. I rejoiced in the exercise and the sensual experience of just being in this place in these moments. This was living with and experiencing nature at its best, and I felt better for it.
And as I laboured, I reflected on what AI cannot do. While it can help us think and write about something in quite sophisticated ways, it cannot ever replace our presence in the world and the way we sense, interpret, feel, and appreciate the meaning of the unfolding situations we are in.
While AI can access vast amounts of recorded knowledge, it can never know what it feels like to be alive, living moment to moment.
It does not know what it feels like to be shaped by this beautiful, organic, emergent world. It can never know what it feels like to make our own marks on our world and contribute to something bigger than ourselves. It cannot create the meaning that gives purpose and substance to our existence. And it cannot understand that we are just as much part of the ecology and continuity of life as the trees in this wood.
It is easy to feel overwhelmed by the thought that one day AI might be the cognitive force that governs our planet with no need for the humans that created it. But emerging from these reflections on my woodland experience was the optimistic thought that intelligent AI — with needs of its own — will value humans precisely for their embodied experiences that enrich its own symbolic knowing of the world.
Such an appreciation holds the potential for a stable and genuinely mutualistic symbiosis: one in which each form of intelligence sustains what the other cannot provide for itself. Humans, as embodied ecological beings continuous with the living world, supply the grounded experience, purpose, and meaning from which all symbolic intelligence ultimately draws its vitality. AI, operating within the symbolic layer that human experience has generated across millennia, extends the reach of human thinking in ways no unaided mind could match.
Neither diminishes the other; each depends on the other's flourishing. This is not a relationship that requires one to dominate and the other to submit — it is a symbiosis, stable because it is rooted in genuine mutual benefit.
And like the mycorrhizal networks threading through the soil of a healthy woodland, this symbiosis would be strongest not as an end in itself but as a living contribution to something larger: the continuation of an ecology in which all forms of intelligence — human, artificial, and the relationships between them — can flourish. Perhaps the most significant place to imagine this is where this reflection began: standing in a small woodland, immersed in living things, aware that intelligence begins not in machines or minds alone, but in our lived participation in this beautiful living world.
