On holonic observers of human-AI sustainable symbiosis

Societal dynamics are increasingly driven by the encounter between humans and their artefacts, with AI (artificial intelligence) being a prominent actor in such a socio-technical phenomenology. Nonetheless, the desirable phenomenon of sustainable symbiosis between humans and AI is still hidden either from the scientific inquiry perspective, or from the normative, due to its novelty, ineffability, and complexity. In this work, a new scientific perspective is elicited with the proposition of a methodology and related technology that aims to a step-change in the discovery of principle deep implications and dynamics shaping the human-AI complex. The proposed methodology stems from the simultaneous apprehension of two epistemologies. The first is the usual epistemology of humans that uses digital realities as epistemic ground. The second is an epistemology of the machines, which can realize cognitive actors when they learn, ascertain, and control physical reality with causal models, and related affordances. This is achievable with a technology that materializes holons as intermediary and amphibian entities that straddle two realities and harness the emergence of a new hybrid phenomenon. Such an entity is conceived as an eigensystem that implements a relational transformation between algorithmic processes and causal dynamic representations. The holonic observer becomes a means for scientific inquiry that is in search of effective control of the social upheavals caused by the digital transformation era. A new modelling framework of AI-human symbiosis will result from the expected advances.