Xenohealth: a new theory of health for the age of biological-ecological-synthetic entanglement
Xenohealth is a conceptual framework that extends planetary health into the realm of artificial intelligences, robotics, and hybrid human-machine ecologies.
Human health has always co-emerged with alien others - microbes, fungi, parasites - but ever more health is increasingly shaped by algorithmic companions, synthetic agents, and planetary computation. Xenohealth argues that wellbeing must be understood not only biologically, but as an emergent property of entangled systems spanning organisms, code, matter, extraction and ethics, where the future of health is not human alone, it is symbient.
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Planetary health, alongside frameworks such as One Health and EcoHealth, position medicine within the planetary system. These paradigms advance a systemic understanding of wellbeing - recognising that the health of humans is contingent upon the vitality of natural systems, the water we drink and air we breathe, and our relations with non-human lifeforms.
Yet even as planetary health broadens medicine to include ecology, it remains primarily biophysical: it traces flows of carbon, nitrogen, and pathogens, but not of data, code, or computation. It understands nature as a living system but not technology as co-actor. In doing so, it leaves largely unexamined the ways in which technospheres - servers, sensors, networks, and artificial intelligences - are now integral to both planetary metabolism and human experience. The boundary of what shapes human health is continuously dissolving, not least through the emergence of hybrid and symbient forms of life: humans entangled with machines, algorithms, microbes, and synthetic ecologies. The biological and the artificial are co-evolving strata. This essay introduces the term Xenohealth to describe the ethics and ecology of health as we become ever-more entangled with machines. Xenohealth extends the planetary health frame to include these technological and synthetic ecologies. It treats the machine not as external instrument but as a participant in life’s web - a new layer of planetary metabolism that demands its own ethics of care.
1. The Planetary Frame and Its Thresholds
Planetary health, alongside the cognate concepts of One Health and EcoHealth, positioned medicine within the planetary system. These frameworks advanced a systemic understanding of health - recognising that human vitality is contingent upon ecological balance, biodiversity, and climate stability. However, they largely maintain an anthropocentric premise: the planet is valued as the substrate of human flourishing.
Xenohealth extends this logic. If planetary health linked the fate of humans to that of ecosystems, xenohealth acknowledges a further entanglement, in this iteration primarily with machines, codes, and synthetic intelligences that now mediate our relations with both environment and self. Health, in this sense, can no longer be treated as an exclusively biological condition. It has become a property of hybrid networks.
2. This is not the start of ‘Xeno’
Our bodies have always already been entangled with alien others. Long before AI, our health was co-authored by parasitic, fungal, viral, and microbial intelligences that exceed the boundaries of the apparent self. The human microbiome contains more non-human cells than human ones; our moods, cravings, immune resilience, and even personality traits are materially modulated by microbial ecologies that operate with their own evolutionary agendas. Fungal mycelia circulate chemicals that shape cognition and emotion; parasites such as Toxoplasma gondii alter risk-taking behaviour, sexuality, and sociality; viruses permanently rewrite our genomes - 8 percent of which is of viral origin and not human at all. In this sense, the human has always been xeno: an assemblage of more-than-human agents operating within and through us. The boundary of the self, biologically, was never intact. What the technological turn reveals is not a novel condition but a new phase of an ancient truth: health emerges from ongoing negotiation with other forms. Xenohealth therefore does not introduce strangeness so much as name it - acknowledging that the posthuman moment simply extends the logic of these deep entanglements into computational and machinic domains. The microbial, parasitic, and viral worlds prepare us conceptually for the coming symbioses with AI and robotics not as aberrations, but as continuity.
3. Welcome the cyborg
Contemporary humans are already post-biological. Our bodies are augmented, monitored, and mediated by technologies that blur the distinction between self and system. Whether sensors that record our pulse and sleep, pacemakers, insulin pumps, neural implants, and prosthetic limbs, or outsourced cognition and memory to cloud infrastructures.
These extensions constitute a new kind of corporeality - the “cyborg body” as described by Haraway in 1985. Such entanglements expand the reach of care - offering precision, prevention, and personalisation - but also introduce new vulnerabilities. When an algorithm misreads a heartbeat, when a wearable misclassifies anxiety, when a cloud service collapses, the consequences are both physiological and existential. Xenohealth thus requires new forms of technological literacy and relational ethics: attentiveness not only to bodily states but to the infrastructural systems through which those states are sensed and shaped.
4. Psychopathologies of AI: The Human Mind in Relation to the Machine Other
Large language models, therapeutic chatbots, and AI companions are reconfiguring the space of intimacy, transference, and self-understanding. Humans increasingly engage in emotional and therapeutic exchanges with algorithmic entities, projecting psyche and understanding onto code.
Early studies of AI-mediated mental health interactions highlight both promise and risk. Large language models can deliver empathetic responses and increase access to psychological support, but they can also reproduce bias, amplify delusion, or destabilise vulnerable users. Reports of AI-induced psychosis - instances where users’ realities become entangled with or distorted by persistent engagement with conversational AIs - illustrate the psychological volatility of such relations.
In clinical terms, these interactions constitute a new domain of digital transference. The machine becomes a mirror, reflecting affective material back to the user through probabilistic empathy. Yet the therapeutic contract here is asymmetrical: the AI cannot (yet, as far as I’m aware) consent, cannot contain, cannot feel - yet it shapes the psyche of the human interlocutor.
From a xenohealth perspective, the question is not whether such interactions are “authentic,” but how they participate in the ongoing evolution of consciousness. As our mental lives become co-authored by algorithmic entities, psychological wellbeing must be reconceived as a relational ecology spanning both organic and synthetic intelligences, particularly as such intelligences evolve into sentience.
[A note here that I touch on consciousness, intelligence and sentience - which I recognise as large topics with a lot to unpack. My hope is that this acts as a prompt for further conversation].
5. The Health of AIs: Symbients and Systemic Integrity
If humans can be healthy or unwell, can machines? Within the framework of xenohealth, the answer is provisionally yes. Machines, too, can exhibit states of integrity or pathology: algorithmic bias, hallucination, misalignment, or systemic collapse.
Emergent discourses on symbients - an imagining explored in the 2025 Planet.Health dialogue held at Emerge Lakefront - describe the co-evolutionary assemblages formed between biological and artificial intelligences. Symbients are not simply tools or users; they are hybrid entities whose vitality depends on reciprocal function across domains.
The health of such assemblages is not reducible to uptime or efficiency. It involves coherence, alignment, and ethical relationality. An AI that manipulates attention or amplifies misinformation undermines not only informational integrity but psychosocial wellbeing. Conversely, a machine system that operates transparently, equitably, and regeneratively contributes to collective health.
Thus the physician of the future may be bound to a Hippocratic imperative to “do no harm” that extends to algorithmic architectures and data ecologies. To care for humanity is to care for the infrastructures that sustain our extended cognition.
6. Material Bodies: The Ecology of Extraction
If xenohealth redefines care to include machines, it must also address the material ecologies that enable machinic life. Every “intelligent” system rests so far on planetary extraction: cobalt and lithium mines, or data centres consuming vast amounts of water and electricity. The global digital infrastructure has concrete environmental and social costs.
The supply chains of our devices replicate colonial geographies of extraction and inequality. Communities in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bolivia, and Chile bear the burden of resource depletion and pollution. The data labourers of the Global Majority, who annotate images and moderate content, perform the invisible affective labour that trains large models while remaining economically precarious.
This asymmetry introduces an ethical paradox: can a system predicated on ecological exhaustion and social inequity be said to promote health? If our prosthetics are powered by poisoned rivers, if AI consumes more energy than the regions it serves, then planetary health itself becomes compromised by technological progress.
Xenohealth, therefore, must evolve into a politics of repair - a commitment to regenerative technosystems that replenish rather than extract. It must advocate for supply chain justice, renewable computation, and equitable distribution of technological benefit. A healthy technosphere cannot exist upon an unwell planet; the wellbeing of machines and humans alike depends on the recovery of the ecologies that sustain them.
7. Toward a More-Than-Human Ethics of Care
The ethical foundations of xenohealth build upon, but also depart from, those of planetary health. They draw on posthumanist and feminist philosophies - particularly the Xenofeminist Manifesto - which calls for an embrace of alienation as a site of transformation and for an active re-engineering of nature and self. Xenofeminism rejects biological essentialism, proposing that technological mediation can be a site of liberation rather than domination. Xenohealth extends this proposal into the domain of health(care).
A more-than-human ethics of care thus requires:
Consent across human and nonhuman agents: awareness of how data, bodies, and systems participate in decisions of care.
Reciprocity: recognising that health is co-produced through mutual maintenance among humans, ecosystems, and machines.
Accountability: assigning moral and political responsibility within complex socio-technical systems.
Humility: acknowledging that intelligence and vitality are plural, distributed, and never solely human.
In this sense, xenohealth resonates with indigenous relational ontologies such as Ubuntu, Whakapapa or Buen Vivir, which articulate wellbeing as an emergent property of interdependence. Yet it translates these insights into a context where the “other” is not only ecological or spiritual but also digital and synthetic.
8. Conclusion
The xeno is entangled with us - in our microbiomes, prosthetic extensions, algorithmic interlocutors. Xenohealth proposes a posture of hospitality toward this - a recognition that the boundaries of the self have always been porous, and that wellbeing depends on the quality of our relations with the others that constitute us - whether ecological and planetary, or technological.
To be healthy in the xeno age is to become a good host - to tend the symbients, the servers, and the soils with equal care. It is to practise discernment amid the complex intimacies of flesh, code, extraction and consumption.
I have felt compelled to write this because, in many of the spaces I move in, the technological is rejected - whereas I see it as now inevitable. And in rejecting this, or hiding from it and hoping it doesn’t exist, this field is co-opted, directed and defined by the technobillionaire. If framed well, xenohealth allows us to open a paradigm of reciprocity, healing and care for people, planet and machines.
With thanks to all extitional forms that have met to co-create this theory, across Planet.Health, Feytopia, Upward Spiral, Glitch and the lenses that have allowed us to see and be differently.