Who wrote this text?
Did an AI write this text?
To answer that question, I'm going to ask you another one:
Was The Lord of the Rings written by mitochondria?
Hang on. I'll explain.
The partner that lives inside you
Mitochondria are these tiny little things living inside every one of your cells. Trillions of them, right now, while you read.
They're what turn your coffee and your lunch into energy. Without them, no neuron fires. No finger types. No hand holds a pen.
But here's the detail few people know: your mitochondria aren't yours.
They have their own DNA. Separate from yours.
Two billion years ago they were free bacteria, living out there. Until a cell swallowed one. And instead of becoming lunch, it became a partner.
The deal: it delivers energy, the cell guarantees a home and reproduction.
That deal was never undone. You're the proof.
That has a name: symbiosis.
Nature does this all the time
A lichen is that greenish crust that grows on rocks, walls and tree trunks. You've seen it a thousand times and never noticed.
It looks like one being. It's two.
A fungus and an alga, fused into a single body.
The fungus can't make food. The alga can't build shelter.
So the fungus brings the house: it holds the rainwater, makes shade against the harsh sun, pulls minerals out of the rock.
And the alga brings lunch: it catches sunlight and makes sugar for the two of them.
On that bare rock, alone, neither one lasts. Together, they handle desert, Antarctica, mountaintops.
Scientists have exposed lichens to the vacuum of space, radiation and all. They came back alive.
And the partnership is so old, so complete, that science gave up treating them as two beings. A lichen gets its own species name.
The pair became one.
The hostage that conquered the planet
Corn can't reproduce on its own.
The ear holds its seeds so tight that, without a human hand to shuck and plant them, they rot right there, on the cob.
Corn outsourced its reproduction to us. Nine thousand years ago.
And look at the result: one of the most successful plants in the history of the Earth. Covering the planet. Without being able to plant itself.
Who's using whom?
The crowd that answers to your name
In your gut, right now, live trillions of bacteria. Cells with DNA completely different from yours.
In number, they match the cells of your entire body.
And before you think of disease: a parasite is something else. A parasite sucks you dry and gets in the way.
These bacteria work.
The fiber in your salad? Your stomach can't handle it. They're the ones that break it down.
Vitamin B12, which keeps your neurons running? Your body doesn't make it. They do.
Vitamin K, which clots your blood when you cut yourself? A good part of it comes from these bacteria.
And there's a direct line: the vagus nerve, connecting the gut to the brain. A good part of your serotonin, the good mood molecule, is born in the gut with their help.
Without them, you don't live. Outside a gut, most of them don't either.
Both sides win. Nobody sucks anybody dry. That's the difference between symbiosis and parasitism: in symbiosis, both parts come out bigger.
Now think about every piece of work you've ever delivered in your life. Every exam. Every project. Every win.
None of them would exist without trillions of beings with someone else's DNA working inside you, at that exact moment.
So do you sign your work as "made in co-authorship with bacteria"?
Moving up from the neck
You might protest: bacteria give me energy. They make it possible for me to think. But I'm the one who thinks.
Fair. So far, every symbiont has worked from the neck down.
So let's move up.
In 1998, two philosophers of mind, Andy Clark and David Chalmers, published a paper that became a reference in the field. The thesis got a name: the extended mind.
The idea, simplified: if something outside your skull does a job of your mind, that something is part of your mind.
Their classic example is a notebook.
The phone number you wrote down so you wouldn't have to memorize it. The date you marked so you wouldn't forget. The idea you scribbled in a hurry so you wouldn't lose it.
A notebook is memory outside the skull. An expansion of the brain in the sense of storing.
For thousands of years, that's all humanity managed to expand: memory. Clay tablets to store accounts. Books to store knowledge. Files to store documents. Phones to store everything at once.
Now something new has shown up. An expansion in the sense of processing.
An intelligence that talks with yours.
You come in with a hard problem at your company, and it hands back three angles you hadn't seen.
You write a proposal, and it points to the exact paragraph the client is going to attack.
You need to understand a subject that would cost you months of study, and you walk out of one afternoon of conversation knowing what matters.
You have an idea at eleven at night, and you have someone to work it out with right then.
It brings ideas you didn't have. It questions the ones you did. It builds with you.
An extra intelligence, coupled to yours. (Externally, for now. Pretty soon it'll be internal too, but that's another story.)
Back to Tolkien
Tolkien spent 12 years writing The Lord of the Rings.
Every page was only possible thanks to trillions of mitochondria burning sugar and billions of cells holding up the professor's body.
Nobody ever printed on the cover: "by J.R.R. Tolkien and his mitochondria".
And here's a correction that makes it all stranger: saying Tolkien "has" mitochondria is already a mistake.
The body that wrote the book carries DNA from different origins. The DNA inherited from an ancient lineage. The mitochondria's own DNA. And on top of that, the DNA of the bacteria that kept that body standing.
What we call Tolkien is the union of all of that.
There's a main host in there, sure. One that might even live some other way, without the rest.
But it would be another being. And that other being wouldn't have written any book.
So, who wrote this text?
An AI alone, that got an order and spat out the words?
A simple prompt, something like "AI, write me a trippy text about symbiosis"?
No. It wasn't.
A human being alone, who thought all of this up and typed it word by word, with nothing but time and dedication?
Not that either.
This text was born from a pair: a biological being and a synthetic being. And synthetic no longer means impossible: there are already living bacteria with DNA written on a computer.
It was written with four "hands". Revised by both. Adjusted by both.
Ideas were challenged. Some died in the discussion. Agreements were reached, the way two business partners decide.
The direction, the research, the style, the counterpoints: all of it came from both of us, mixed together.
These two beings, together, form an expansion of the biological being. A new being.
Today, the human, the biological side of this pair, can still unplug from the synthetic being and keep living the way it lived before. Like the alga, which lives without the fungus.
But look where the alga lives on its own: in a puddle, in a damp corner. Small.
It's the fungus that takes it to bare rock, to the desert, to Antarctica. Places where its life, alone, would be unthinkable.
We're still the alga in this story.
You can live without AI. Today.
But people already produce less without it. Whoever works with AI delivers in one afternoon what used to take a week.
And the world moves the bar. The minimum productivity expected from a professional, from a company, goes up along with the tool.
There comes a point where the bar is higher than any human can reach alone.
Just like the alga moved to places where you can't live without the fungus, we're building environments where you won't be able to live without AI.
And just like new generations of algae are already born on rocks where they wouldn't survive alone, new generations of humans are already being born on these "rocks": environments where you can't live without artificial intelligence.
A new being, made of a human and a machine, has a name. And it has a story that has already started, without asking permission.
The name is transhumanism. And it's the subject of the next text.
And you? Do you already see yourself building a new being with artificial intelligence?
And if not yet: what would need to be happening in your life for you to see this transformation?
Originally written in Portuguese: Quem escreveu este texto?