Human AI Symbiosis Compilation (AC Ep77)

“Generative AI is the first technology with an almost natural propensity to build a symbiotic relationship with us. But symbiosis isn’t always mutualistic—it can be parasitic, where AI benefits at the detriment of humans. How we deploy AI will determine which path we take.”

– Alexandra Diening

“AI provides dual affordances—it can automate our work or augment our abilities. The key challenge is deciding where to draw the line. In low-stakes tasks, automation makes sense. But in high-stakes decision-making, human intuition is irreplaceable.”

– Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi

“We talk a lot about lifelong learning, but we also need to embrace lifelong forgetting. If we keep piling new knowledge on top of outdated thinking, we won’t evolve. The future isn’t about ‘us vs. them’—it’s about humans and AI co-evolving together.”

– Erica Orange

“AI isn’t just changing how we work—it’s changing what it means to be human. We are interlacing with technology more deeply than ever, and in the future, AI won’t just be something we use—it will be something we integrate into ourselves.”

– Pedro Uria Recio

About Alexandra Diening, Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi, Erica Orange, & Pedro Uria Recio

Alexandra Diening is Co-founder & Executive Chair of Human-AI Symbiosis Alliance. She has held a range of senior executive roles including as Global Head of Research & Insights at EPAM Systems. Through her career she has helped transform over 150 digital innovation ideas into products, brands, and business models that have attracted $120 million in funding . She holds a PhD in cyberpsychology, and is author of Decoding Empathy: An Executive’s Blueprint for Building Human-Centric AI and A Strategy for Human-AI Symbiosis.

Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi is Associate Professor at the School of Information and Library Science at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has won numerous awards for teaching and his papers, including for his article “Artificial intelligence and the future of work: Human-AI symbiosis in organizational decision making.” His wide-ranging research spans many aspects of the social and organizational implications of information and communication technologies.

Erica Orange is a futurist, speaker, and author, and Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of leading futurist consulting firm The Future Hunters. She has spoken at TEDx and keynoted over 250 conferences around the world, and been featured in news outlets including Wired, NPR, Time, Bloomberg, and CBS This Morning. Her book AI + The New Human Frontier: Reimagining the Future of Time, Trust + Truth is out in September 2024.

Pedro Uria-Recio is a highly experienced analytics and AI executive. He was until recently the Chief Analytics and AI Officer at True Corporation, Thailand’s leading telecom company, and is about to announce his next position. He is also author of the recently launched book Machines of Tomorrow: From AI Origins to Superintelligence & Posthumanity. He was previously a consultant at McKinsey and is on the Forbes Tech Council.

Websites:

Alexadra Diening

Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi

Erica Orange

Pedro Uria Recio

LinkedIn Profiles:

Alexandra Diening

Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi

Erica Orange

Pedro Uria Recio

What you will learn

• Understanding human-AI symbiosis and its impact
• Why AI can be mutualistic or parasitic
• The crucial role of human intuition in AI decision-making
• How automation and augmentation shape the future of work
• Rethinking AI deployment beyond traditional software models
• The need for lifelong forgetting to adapt to AI advancements
• How AI could transform humanity through deep integration

Episode Resources

Companies & Organizations

• Human-AI Symbiosis Alliance
• IBM
• OpenAI
• NPR

Books & Publications

• AI and the New Human Frontier (by Erica Orange)
• Machines of Tomorrow (by Pedro Uria Recio)

Technical Terms & Concepts

• Human-AI symbiosis
• Generative AI
• Automation vs. augmentation
• Algorithmic management
• Brain-computer interfaces
• Deep learning
• Data bias
• AI literacy
• AI product lifecycle
• Holistic decision-making
• Lifelong learning

Transcript

Ross Dawson: So, you’ve recently established the Human-AI Symbiosis Alliance, and that sounds very, very interesting. But before we dig into that, I’d like to hear a bit of the backstory. How did you come to be on this journey?

Alexandra Diening: It’s a long journey. I’ll try to make it short and interesting.

I entered the world of AI almost two decades ago through a very unconventional path—neuroscience. I’m a neuroscientist by training, and my focus was on understanding how the brain works. Naturally, if you want to process all the neuroscience data, you can’t do it alone. You inevitably have to touch upon AI. That was my gateway into the field.

As I started working with AI, I gained a basic understanding of how it operates from a technical perspective as a scientific discipline. At that time, there weren’t many people working in this kind of AI, so the industry naturally pulled me in. I started working in the business application of AI, progressively shifting from neuroscience to AI deployment within a business context. I worked with Fortune 500 companies across life sciences, retail, finance, and many more industries.

That was my entry—my “chapter one”—into the world of AI. But as I began deploying AI within real businesses, I started noticing patterns. Sometimes AI projects succeeded, and sometimes they failed. I realized that success was most often achieved when we doubled down on human-centricity. That was an easy concept for me to grasp because cognitive science is my foundation.

This human-centric approach became even more important with the emergence of generative AI. AI was no longer just in the background, crunching data and steering our decisions without us realizing it. AI has been around for quite some time, but suddenly, we could interact with it directly, almost like an agent. We could communicate with it using our language. It could capture emotions, build relationships with us, and augment our capabilities. It was no longer just a tool—it was becoming a social-technological actor.

This realization led us to our hypothesis: generative AI is the first technology with an almost natural, almost default propensity to form a symbiotic relationship with humans. It’s not just a tool that does something or doesn’t—it’s about mutual interaction.

The term “symbiosis” sounds very romantic, particularly because of the way pop culture has shaped our understanding of it. But in nature, symbiosis manifests across a spectrum of outcomes. It can be highly positive and mutualistic, where both parties benefit—humans improve, and AI gets better. However, it can also be parasitic, where one party benefits at the detriment of the other.

This pattern became clea