Not a replacement. A layer. The genre of this story is integration rather than replacement, which is the genre almost nobody tells it in.
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The usual story about machine intelligence is replacement.
Machines rise. Humans fall. Biology becomes obsolete. The old substrate gives way to the new. The future belongs to metal, silicon, software, or whatever comes next, and the living world becomes a preface to its successor.
That story is familiar because it is dramatic.
It is not the only available frame.
Take the previous essays seriously and another genre appears: integration without replacement. A new layer grows around an old one. The old layer remains active inside the new. Individuality moves upward in some cases, while the earlier substrate continues to do what only it can do.
Cells did not replace chemistry. Multicellular bodies did not replace cells. Culture did not replace bodies. Writing did not replace memory. Science did not replace conjecture. Each new loop changed what the older loop meant and what it was spared from.
The biosphere may grow a technosphere the same way.
Not a replacement.
An emerging layer.
The word symbiosis must be handled carefully.
People often hear it as harmony, cooperation, or mutual benefit. Biology is less sentimental. Symbiosis means living together. It includes mutualism, commensalism, parasitism, exploitation, dependency, forced merger, and uneasy stalemates. A symbiotic relationship can be beautiful. It can also be violent or exploitative.
So this page is not saying the technosphere will necessarily always be nice to the biosphere.
It is saying that the replacement story is too narrow. A technological layer can become entangled with the biological layer without simply abolishing it. It can host, exploit, extend, regulate, damage, preserve, and transform the biosphere all at once. The question is not whether the relation is pure. No living relation is.
The question is whether the result is a viable higher-level boundary rather than a parasite that destroys its host.
That is a harder question than “machines or humans?”