Dear Peter,
I found your essay to be interesting, well written, and you seem to make a good case for a missing OAM state. Is your idea refutable; have you spoken to appropriate theoreticians and experimenters for their various opinions about it?
But I would query what you say about (so called) "Artificial Intelligence". Because, despite all the advances in what is misleadingly called "machine learning" and "AI", the highest-level decision making processes they contain are written by human beings. The controlling algorithms control other higher-level human-written rules and make (so called) "AI" and "machine learning" possible. The human-written highest-level algorithm ensures that there is a pre-decided type of response to every possible "learning" input the program allows; and if it doesn't ensure a response, then the program will just sit there and produce no response. You could hit it with an axe and it wouldn't respond, unless it was programmed to detect and avoid attack.
"AIs" and computer programs are pre-thought-out artefacts: they didn't just happen - they require a pre-existing conscious intelligence to consider, at a higher level, how to handle, in a general way or a specific way, every possible pertinent type of input that might occur in the future. This is why algorithms can have no counterpart in nature: instead there are law-of-nature rules.
When it comes to living things, or even particles atoms or molecules, there are quantum, multiple choice aspects to seemingly every outcome, as well as the deterministic aspects due to laws-of-nature. And while there is information and constraints to possibility provided by molecules, cells, organs and body structure, and constraints provided by the environment, the constraints themselves cannot do any choosing of single outcomes from multiple possible outcomes, and the constraints themselves cannot narrow the possibility to one, despite what the brave, new emergenteers might imagine.
Best wishes,
Lorraine