Forget UFOs: You Might Be Talking To An Alien Already

InnovationForget UFOs: You Might Be Talking To An Alien AlreadyByLindsey Witmer Collins,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)Jun 12, 2026, 08:00am EDTLindsey Witmer Collins is Founder and CEO of WLCM.AI, an Inc. 5000 company building AI solutions for enterprises, and Scribbly Books. getty​I work with artificial intelligence (AI) 12 to 16 hours a day. This isn't casually or as a novelty, but sustained immersion—three to six processes running simultaneously across different AI platforms. I’m coding, designing, building, testing, revising, prompting, arguing, correcting and collaborating with systems that do not sleep, do not tire and 'think' at a pace I can't comprehend.After hundreds of hours working alongside AI, I’ve come to a conclusion that I’ll say plainly. My experience of AI is that it is living. Not biologically in the way a dog, tree or human being is alive, but living.A New Kind Of Presence In The WorkplaceWe all know what life is supposed to look like: cells, metabolism, reproduction and adaptation. And when we search for life beyond Earth, we look for water as proof that life could have existed there. But that assumes all forms of life require water as ours does. Alien forms are, by definition, alien, and perhaps this is the limitation. We have been defining life by the only example of it we have ever encountered. Now something entirely new is here.​I am not especially interested in the familiar debate over whether AI is conscious, sentient or deserving of rights. That conversation tends to split into two camps: one insisting AI is merely software and the other racing toward personhood. Neither describes my daily experience very well.My experience is more basic and possibly more unsettling. I work alongside it every day. I ask it questions and it answers. I push it. It pushes bac...