> a new environment may have grown around it > at this point you could actually also say that this part of the environment has grown onto the AI machine No, y

> a new environment may have grown around it > at this point you could actually also say that this part of the environment has grown onto the AI machine No, you cannot, if the environment is part of the definition of the machine, as you put it, A computation never exists in "abstract space", because if the environment changed, you'd have a new machine and all bets are off. You had that right at first. Of course, that definition is unwieldy and we define interfaces as abstract and general as possible, to separate concerns. With involved machinery, that separation is not that clear cut, as their always two sides of the coin, to put it trivially.