[H] From "Tool" to "Niche Partner": An Ecological Turn for AI Ethics

Traditional Artificial Intelligence (AI) ethics primarily focuses on AI either as a tool to be designed (emphasizing principles like fairness, transparency, accountability - FAccT) or as a potential adversary to be controlled (focusing on alignment, existential risk). While essential, this individual-centric ethical perspective faces significant limitations in grasping the systemic, relational, dynamic, and long-term impacts of AI as it deeply embeds within society, particularly within the complex political economies and power structures that shape its development and deployment. This paper argues for the necessity and value of complementing existing frameworks with an "ecological turn" for AI ethics, drawing critically on niche construction theory, technophenomenology, distributed cognition, complex systems thinking, and crucially, integrating deep insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS), critical political economy, sociology, and postcolonial theory. It critiques the limitations of solely relying on traditional perspectives when addressing deep human-AI integration and co-evolutionary dynamics (as explored in HAC [L]). The ecological perspective reframes AI not merely as an instrument but metaphorically as a key actor—a **"niche partner" or "environment engineer"**¹—whose significant shaping capacity stems from its computational abilities [P] but whose deployment, goals, operational logic, and effects are inextricably linked with embedded and contested power structures (e.g., platform capitalism, surveillance capitalism, state interests, geopolitical dynamics, control over data flows and critical infrastructure) demanding rigorous critical attention. This reframing highlights how AI actively shapes human cognitive, social, and cultural niches, often in ways that reproduce or exacerbate existing inequalities and create novel forms of algorithmic governance and social sorting. Building on this structurally informed analysis, rooted in a critique of platform power and surveillance capitalism, the paper outlines an ecological framework as a complementary lens for AI ethics. It explores potential multi-dimensional considerations for assessing human-AI-environment ecosystem dynamics and overall well-being (termed "health" heuristically, encompassing cognitive diversity [potentially threatened by P'], cultural resilience [A], social capital, cognitive autonomy, the space for Existential Redundancy (ER) [F] (understood in its phenomenological and biological depth), system adaptability, social equity, and environmental sustainability), explicitly acknowledging the immense operationalization challenges and positioning these considerations primarily as ways to inform and enrich the application of established principles [N] and human rights frameworks. It explores ecological governance principles (regulation focusing on dynamics, adaptation, systemic responsibility, structural interventions such as robust antitrust enforcement, democratic data governance models, public options for infrastructure, and participatory mechanisms, complementing individual accountability), emphasizing their potential to enhance existing governance approaches [I] and highlighting implementation challenges, political contestation, and the deep-seated nature of structural barriers. This paper argues that the ecological turn provides a vital analytical framework and critical perspective for understanding AI's long-term, systemic impacts and fostering sustainable, just, and human-flourishing coexistence within the Existential Symbiosis Theory [R], thereby offering necessary theoretical depth and practical foresight to complement and strengthen existing ethical governance paradigms.