Friend or Foe? Rethinking Taxonomy in Collaboration with AI

AI now sees life. It sees it with precision, with speed, with an unflinching gaze that never tires. It categorizes faster than any human, draws connections across data we can barely comprehend, and suggests structures we’ve never imagined. A silent observer, a tireless archivist, it builds a new order of the living world—one dataset at a time.

So what happens to us—the slow ones, the meaning-makers—when the machine becomes the master of classification? Do we step back? Or step beside it?

🤖 What AI Does Best

Artificial intelligence is a prodigy of patterns. It detects subtle genetic markers, deciphers birdsong variations, maps vegetation through satellite scans, and learns to sort, label, cluster—faster and more consistently than any taxonomist with a microscope or a field notebook ever could.

AI is not distracted by anecdote or seduced by narrative. It makes no assumptions about beauty or ugliness, importance or insignificance. It doesn’t hesitate. It simply observes, calculates, and acts.

Already, AI is redrawing the map of life as we know it. It proposes previously unknown evolutionary groupings, detects subtle microbial communities, and helps reconstruct ancient phylogenies once buried in silence. These are profound achievements. But even so, something essential is missing.

📚 What AI Cannot Do

AI does not wonder. It does not hesitate before naming. It does not feel the chill of extinction, nor the joy of rediscovery.

It does not know what it means to love a species before understanding it—to track it across seasons, to wait for it, to fail, and try again. AI cannot grieve the loss of a frog that once called in a single valley and now calls nowhere.

It does not understand what it means when a name disappears. But we do.

Humans carry a slower intelligence—one stitched with story, memory, humility. We ask not only what is it?, but why does it matter? and what might it become?

This makes us flawed classifiers—but also, perhaps, more ethical ones.

🌟 Two Ways of Seeing

We often frame this encounter as a competition: machine versus mind, precision versus intuition. But maybe it’s time to rewrite that story. Maybe the future of taxonomy isn’t a race. Maybe it’s a duet.

AI sees with breadth; we see with depth.

• AI handles vast data; humans interpret subtle signals.
• AI builds maps; humans chart journeys.
• AI points the light; humans choose where to walk.

What AI reveals, we must learn to feel. What AI accelerates, we must slow down to absorb. In this partnership, we can build a taxonomy not just of classification, but of care.

🌿 A New Kind of Science

So what legacy do we choose? A list of names etched into databases? Or a record of reverence, of connection, of stories told at the edge of the known world?

In an age when machines may soon name every beetle, bacterium, and bird, our role may be to ensure the story doesn’t stop at the name. To remind ourselves that every label should be followed by a question. And every category, by a conversation.

Because classification is not just about what we sort. It is about what we choose to remember, and how we remember it.

In this future, the taxonomist is not obsolete. The taxonomist is transformed—into a listener, a translator, a bridge between what is known and what is felt.

🌸 For the Unnamed, and the Unseen

We have spent centuries naming the world. “You are a fish.” “You are a weed.” “You are other.” Names helped us manage the unknown. But they also helped us forget.

Now, standing at the edge of a new scientific epoch, we must decide: Will we continue to name only what we can measure, or will we make room for the immeasurable?

Every dandelion that breaks through the pavement, every microbe in the ocean’s blackest depths, every species yet unnamed—they are more than data. They are mystery. They are story. They are part of the whole.

The future of taxonomy lies not in ending names, but in expanding what names can hold. A name should be an invitation, not a prison. A beginning, not a box.

To classify is to care. And to care is to remember that somewhere, something unnamed is still singing—and hoping to be heard.