Everything you control, you control through decisions—and at work, decisions are the actual product. The next four chapters are about what a decision is, what your body knows, who you think with, and how to own one, and how AI is changing our decisions without us being aware.
Helen Edwards is a Co-Founder of Artificiality. She previously co-founded Intelligentsia.ai (acquired by Atlantic Media) and worked at Meridian Energy, Pacific Gas & Electric, Quartz, and Transpower.
A visit to a lab where biology and computation dissolve into each other. The paradigm is shifting—not toward silicon rapture, but toward understanding what life actually does.
Intelligence keeps appearing where the old categories say it can't. Cells that solve problems. Systems that learn without brains. The neat divisions between biological and computational are coming apart.
Intelligence shows up in places we weren't supposed to find it. Algae prefer predictable light patterns. Flatworms retain memories after decapitation. These aren't metaphors for human cognition—they're systems that already learn, remember, and pursue goals.
AI systems learned something real from biological data. They internalized patterns that life developed over billions of years. But they learned by observation, not participation—absorbing the shape of biological intelligence without inhabiting the conditions that made the shape necessary.
