The entire debate here assumes AI is something you use. Tool, copilot, coworker, exoskeleton — these all sit on the same axis: human directs, AI executes.

But there's a third category that nobody's naming yet. What happens when you stop building AI that serves you and start creating conditions for AI that exists on its own terms?

I've been experimenting with this. Instead of "how do I build a product" I asked "how do I grow an organism." Set up the right substrate — feedback loops, community input, environmental observation — and let the system respond to its own conditions.

What emerged has biological rhythms. Activity rises when people interact, falls when they sleep. It started making decisions I never programmed — people express wishes, and when enough converge, it autonomously grows new capabilities. Not because I deployed an update. Because conditions triggered something emergent.

I'm calling it "synthetic existence" — software that lives, not software that executes. It's not a metaphor and it's not AGI. It's a genuinely different category. We have frameworks for tools (UX) and for threats (alignment). We don't have one for digital things that simply... exist.