I recently flew to Sydney to address the Club of United Business on lessons coral reefs could teach us about being better leaders. We were there to find out how different and more natural ways of thinking were beginning to alter the way economies and people operate this decade. During the Q&A afterwards, I was asked specifically about AI. The discussion revolved around the question, is Artificial Intelligence more or less like nature?
After a pause, I answered, ‘it’s not’. Having had some time to ponder further, here are the rest of my thoughts.
Ecosystem processes still rule the world
Those of you familiar with my writing will know I celebrate what we can learn from how ecosystemsHow ecosystems function An ecosystem is a community of lifeforms that interact in such an optimal way that how ecosystems function best, is when all components (including humans and other animals) can persist and live alongside each other for the longest time possible. Ecosystems are fuelled by the energy created by plants (primary producers) that convert the Sun's heat energy More work. Almost everything humans do successfully or routinely, emulates natural principles. So, while we might believe we’ve evolved away from nature, that’s not true. We are still powerfully bound by it in everyday life. When we deviate, our society becomes less likely to survive.
That goes for any human process that drives our wellbeing (or not). Technology or decision-making that does not conform to natural standards, therefore, has an inherently limited lifespan.
Intelligence is not a uniquely human-centric trait
Tech bros aren’t aware of how ecosystems function(Of an ecosystem). A subset of ecosystem processes and structures, where the ecosystem does something that provides an ecosystem service of value to people. More. In fact, few people are. Even public policy fails much of the time because it doesn’t account for the intangible, non-linear aspects inherent in the brains of complex, interrelated lifeforms. It’s this connectivity that creates the support services for all life on Earth. In human parlance, our connection to nature, makes up the majority of our productivity (economic or otherwise). To ignoring this means making random or poor decisions.
Intelligence is not confined to our species. We are an extension of the intelligences of all lifeforms acting together to stabilise the systems we live inside.
This incredibly complex decision framework either enables or disables our existence. When it’s disrupted, energyEnergy and nutrients are the same thing. Plants capture energy from the Sun and store it in chemicals, via the process of photosynthesis. The excess greenery and waste that plants create, contain chemicals that animals can eat, in order to build their own bodies and reproduce. When a chemical is used this way, we call it a nutrient. As we More is released and this is what culminates in climate change. Climate change is merely the symptom of declining ecosystem productivityThe power of an ecosystem to process energy. The most productive ecosystems have reached a steady stable-state with maximum entropy production. That’s to say, the number of species has reached an optimum and the functions they fulfil, have translated free surplus energy into nutrients that is either stored inside plants and animals, or is entrained within the biological cycles that More.
Artificial intelligence can be used to advance technical solutions under controlled conditions, it can also offer corrupt and misleading advice that draws on the opinions of a human-centric world that is disconnected from nature – How to Survive the Next 100 Years: Lessons from Nature.
In the recent Leading from Being podcast with Marti Spiegelman and Todd Hoskins, I remarked that AI could only be truly effective in helping us address environmental challenges, if it could climb into the minds of ants and magpies too.
AI favours linear thought over natural complexity
The other interesting thing about AI is that it lacks a systemic driver for intelligence. Human intelligence can be considered to come from two places while AI can only come from only one.
All animals, including us, have two nervous systems. One operates our fight or flight reactions and the other enables contemplation and complex thought.
If you’re intent on looking for fruits in a forest, you can momentarily choose to go at a time of day when you think bears occur, or avoid them by making a different decision. If by happenchance a bear charges you anyway, your nervous system can make another linear judgement. Stay and be eaten, or run and hide. Linear decisions dominate our everyday lives.
AI is modelled on linear thinking. It’s processing vast amounts of information to make what it thinks is informed decisions that can help us economically. However, the majority of the data needed to understand whether those decisions are wise, does not come from knowing. It comes from being. Even if AI thinks it knows, it cannot ‘be’.
The efficiency fallacy
The people who build AI are intent on delivering industry the chance to make faster decisions. We’ve been conned into believing that rapid thought and quicker decisions deliver more efficiency.
The problem is that intention is a material fallacy. Nature is inherently slow. It’s also broadly inefficient at small scales, but efficient at large scales and longer time periods. What I mean by this, is if you isolate part of the ecosystem it will most likely waste more energy than it uses. But once you add all of these bits together, they cancel each other out. So it stands to reason, that if we try to make all isolated parts use as much energy as possible, that deprives the other parts, and overall stability collapses.
The Coles-Woolworths conundrum
Two Australian supermarkets are running Palantir military AI technology to create billion dollar profits. All the while, cost of living is pushing more Australians into poverty. Shareholders are benefiting, which is lovely for them. But the same shareholders might lament the demise of famous department stores like Myer and David Jones. Food is one of three basic human needs, alongside water and shelter. If you cannot afford food, you stop purchasing discretionary items from department stores, like fashion and lifestyle. The implementation of AI in supermarkets might be cannabilising the marketplace. Once again, it’s brilliant for shareholders.
But in nature, marketplaces need a large number of cooperating partners doing different tasks and working together to guarantee overall stability and productivity. For every Coles, Woolworths, Myer and David Jones, there are thousands of other smaller businesses. Only a cynic would assume that AI favours all of them equally. What’s instead happening is akin to ecosystem collapse. Diversity is being compromised and the surplus energy of the system (in this case people’s money) is being diverted away from the many, to squeeze as much profit from the few. It cannot possibly last.
Slow and steady wins the race
Total efficiency in any part of a system, therefore, is a panacea. It’s inherently unproductive. As AI is deployed to singular industries or companies that can afford it, it tries to make each part as fast (efficient?) as possible. In doing so, it will make other parts of the system less productive. Especially the poorer parts of the system that can no longer compete for the resources.
Nature, instead, is full of feed back loops, latency and lagtimes. When changes occur, the system doesn’t alter immediately. This allows lifeforms a certain amount of equity. The chance to adapt and modify their knowledge and customary behaviour without the overall system collapsing in the meantime. It’s the basis for evolution of thought and being.
AI is disruptive which is not natural
AI, therefore, is reactive, not responsive. It disrupts rather than harmonises. That disruptionThe result of an action that creates a sudden change in the stability of an ecosystem or process. This tends to create a gap where there is free surplus energy and organisms will move in to fill the space. Disruption might be a tree fall, or the application of pesticide to farmland. Disruption is important to maintain dynamics in ecosystems More is what billionaires want, as it creates gaps in the human-centric marketplace that enable them to become wealthier. Disruption is the last thing we need as a species.
I’m sure this isn’t entirely deliberate. AI coders are concerned with optimising linear thought. It’s the only thing they know! It’s why they are suffering mental health breakdowns and lack of sleep. Their new lives lack culture, laws, empathy and normal societal values. They are coding their living experience into the way AI ‘thinks’. Which means it’s also asking, how can I work faster, longer and harder, to create more efficiency and benefits in my part of the system?
The real values, those that enable real sustainability and productivity, can’t be expressed readily in words or code. They are expressed in feeling and emotion that is missing from the AI lexicon.
Dynamic Pricing
A friend of mine has been holidaying in a regional Victorian town for the last 10 years. He always stays in the same place. This is customer loyalty that all businesses rely upon. When he came to rebook recently, the manager told him that dynamic pricing had pushed the price to $4,800 for 7 days. An unbelievable increase since just last year. AI has determined that this business-owner can make more money during peak times, due to demand. Great for business? So you’d think. But what happens when there is an economic downturn? Lose your regular customers and the stability of your business disintegrates. This much should be obvious.
Take the example from nature. When sea otters were lost from kelp forests in the US, famously, the system collapsed. Fisheries declined and this had huge economic impacts. The sea otter represents a loyal customer. Lose them and it takes enormous effort and time to ‘reintroduce’ them into the system. AI is destroying loyalty and will cripple businesses before they realise what they’ve lost. Then those lag-effects in nature come in. AI cannot change that. Systems cannot be recovered by digital technology. We are still powerfully controlled by natural forces. This story has a good ending though. The manager intervened and reduce the price by 40%. It’s clear AI had failed.
AI has no culture or context for decisions
The most important aspect of our nervous system which defines our humanity, comes from a place that isn’t a result of thinking. This may seem illogical but it’s well known that complex problems can’t be solved that way. They are developed through a more dream-like state. When you take a shower, day dream on a walk, or simply wake up from a good nights sleep, solutions will find you.
AI does not sit and contemplate nothing.
AA Milne,
Winnie the Pooh
In fact, the very definition of an intelligence, might be the ability to know without thinking at all – the shop owner ‘knows’ that AI is overcharging. One could say, for AI to become truly intelligent, it needs to stop thinking altogether. Tell me how a tech company would monetise that?
Our ability to co-build self-sustaining ecosystems with all other animals, and support our own lives, is created in a wholly different way. It’s required thousands of years of cultural legacy without any distinct starting point. It’s also defined, as I mentioned earlier, in our relationship with all other species (even if we don’t know this).
Can AI ever be intelligent more or less like nature?
It’s certainly not ‘intelligent’ and can possibly never be. Because intelligence is contextual and varies from place to place, person to person. We might imagine a time when all our decisions are made for us by an intelligence device we carry around with us. But we have this already. It’s called a brain. And because of its ability to process complex feelings that are non-linear, intangible and complex, it’s more suited to our survival.
Further, our brains are an extension of the neural, even fungal networks, that connect ecosystems together worldwide. We communicate constantly with this outside world using senses that we are not even aware of. Feelings. This has had hundreds of thousands of years to evolve. When that intelligence is used wisely, it’s carbon neutral and it nurtures ecosystems. We are ecosystems and we are our own survival mechanism.
AI operates nothing like these natural systems. It’s missing more than one vital piece. Pieces that make up the vast majority of our collective being. The information AI is built upon, might only be a billion billion billionth of a fraction of the information it actually needs to make wise survival decisions. The data to enable that existence isn’t available digitally. It never will be.
‘Wooldridge said … that AI chatbots failed in unpredictable ways and had no idea when they were wrong, but were designed to provide confident answers regardless.’ Race for AI is making Hindenburg-style disaster ‘a real risk’, says leading expert. The Guardian. 18 Feb 2026.
Why AI behaves unpredictably remains a mystery to most. I believe it can be explained by its grossly inherent lack of meaningful data to contextualise its decisions.
Will AI survive?
Because AI flies in the face of natural systems, it’s difficult to imagine a future where it survives.
The problem for us, is that we’ve already allowed ourselves to have it imposed upon us. Yet the choices it tells us we should make, are based on the same limited thought processes and assumptions, that are causing societal meltdown.
Society is suffering acute anxiety and stress from being overly dependent on linear thinking already. This comes from the decline of our sense of community and the rise of social media (there I’ve cited two paths to solutions better than AI). These factors are causing an epidemic among teenagers that’s resulting in escalating rates of depression and suicide … as if we needed a more obvious indicator of survival failure.
It’s hard to imagine how AI can ever complete the picture enough to make coherent decisions for our future, or its own. Only complex thought based in a collective consciousness, connected to all Earth’s processes, can enable that kind of safety and security.
We have that right now.
It’s in your local community already, if you want to shut off your phones and go take part in it.
