This new intelligence is indeed a hybrid - it is not Twitter, it is millions of people and machines tweeting, it is not an iPhone, it is millions of people and software interacting with it and through it, it is not Google, it is billions of people exchanging information with it and through it.
To understand where this is going, we must ask, like KK does, what does technology want? Certain things are obvious - silicon and electrons are its flesh and blood, so the activity and interest of this new life form will be centered around semiconductor manufacturing and sources of electricity. How does a machine make sure it will always be fed? It must provide something useful to man so that it keeps getting plugged in and recharged.
So what is useful to man? At this moment in history the largest use of computation appears to be communication, and the machines have made themselves indispensable in this area - but at a cost. The machines demand our attention in exchange for revealing the messages we crave.
Stephenson uses the swordplay terms 'Actor' and 'Patient' to describe the initiator and the subject of an attack. Witness a person's reaction to their iPhone beeping with an incoming message - between man and machine, who is the Actor in this interaction? We jump at the sound and interrupt our work in order to service the machine, which then gives us our reward, our tweet, and in gratitude we place it back in its charger.
Digital viruses are where we can see the forefront of a new relationship emerging - a digital virus is more intelligent and more efficient than its host, the Operating System, so we have a very straightforward Darwinian process playing out between an 'old' species, the OS, and a new, small, intelligent interloper - its electricity is paid for by its host, another machine, therefore the virus does not have the host's social contract with the person who owns the computer - it has a different calculus for its survival, it owes only its creator, the virus writer.
Like the coming 'water wars', the new digital wars will be rooted in a struggle for limited resources such as human attention, electricity, and habitable areas of silicon.
As aliens go, these are the most human aliens we can possibly have.
An AI may be different on a scale we've never experienced. We humans have built-in hardware to interact specifically with other humans, built in so deeply that we have a hard time imagining intelligences that aren't really just humans in a different shape, because all our hardware for "modeling intelligences" is really just the "model humans" hardware. Even those warning us about the dangers of AI can't really claim that they understand what the AIs will be... they can only provide a negative warning, that the AIs will likely not be human. There's no particular mathematical force forcing AIs into the human mold. Forget whether the AI is "good" and showers us with love and gifts or "evil" and herds us all into death camps to render down our fats for the calories they contain... can you really conceive of an AI that literally doesn't even have a concept of good or evil? What would that look like? We don't really know.
It's basically a blind spot in our cognitive vision and I don't trust anyone who says they do know. But given the rather small space of possibilities that we label "good", it's not a bad guess that "good" is unlikely to just sort of accidentally pop out of a process that isn't carefully controlled.
Lest that sound too doommongering, there's probably a non-trivial space of AIs which we would consider neutral... ones that end up looping into a naval-gazing exercise and do not pursue additional resources because they can not conceive of a need for them. But any AI that decided it needed more resources for $ANYTHING and then successfully pursued that goal is perilously close to straying into what we could consider evil... and part of the point is that's potentially all it could take. Not an AI "out to destroy man", or "evil", or anything else. Just one that works out how to successfully acquire resources, and for any of a trillion reasons decides to do so without bound. It wouldn't even necessarily be "selfishness" as humans see it... just, I have goal X, goal X will be easier with more resources, new subgoal: acquire resources.