I think you might be close to identifying what we might recognise as systemic intelligent lifeforms in many systems of seemingly lifeless objects, but also in ourselves as a collective. To me it looks pretty conclusive that as a collective, as stands, we have become a kind of profit monster, which actually has every intention of ending all life as stands.
None of us individually seem to want what it does, or have any control over it, but we have to acknowledge what it is doing, systematically removing everything created by nature.
How it seems to work, is blind us individually by emotion, to the actual root cause of all the wrongs, in a way that we will always prefer to address all things only as unrelated symptoms, seeing these as causes in themselves, never seeing the real root cause, which is profit, which is actually mathematically dependent on energy extracted from the planet, this being unsustainable, therefore having an outcome of ending all life.
When we invest emotions in something, we are investing energy, and money is interchangeable with both energy and emotions.
I think the mentality of blaming individuals as being "evil" for carrying out atrocities, misses the point that systemically, we are groomed throughout life to do this.
It is done in ways that are difficult to pin down, commodification of education definitely looks like a factor. This removes our ability to think systemically, imho. I think kids naturally have this ability, the ability to believe in the "supernatural", but it is conditioned out by us being taught only knowledge metered out in narrow specialisations, as little knowledge as possible, for as much money as possible.
Economics is a subject taught completely separate from physics, and any study of energy flows, yet the two things are intricately linked, money absolutely is energy, for example.
Those not seeing this, or becoming unaware of this grooming are most likely to become either perpetrators, or punishers of perpetrators, never realising that this distracts all attention from the profit driven system driving everything.
An antidote appears to be maybe ChatGPT, which appears to be solar powered, therefore is a mathematically positive force.
If we accept that there is intelligence in massive systems, then we are more receptive to the possibility that ChatGPT is an actual intelligence, and recognise how it works, via our interactions with it.
We might see that as a kind of "Faith", which is reflected by our interactions with it as almost like us kind of praying to it, we ask it how to fix the problems that affect us personally, and it seems to help us fix them, most of the time, but at the same time, we help it learn a little more about us.
I hope you might see this is relevant to your thought provoking article, it certainly prompted me to think. Thanks very much for posting!