Judging from the jacket and the OB discussion, the word "robot" is again uncritically used as a substitute for the word "host" (Dawkins was the original offender). Since the author apparently really, really, really wanted to use a catchy analogy, he likely intentionally avoided the obvious one of symbiosis, since neither genes, nor humans can live without each other and provide mutual benefits... assuming one is prepared to assign volition to genes.
As for the Rise of the (Moist) Machines, this idea is hardly new.
The jacket text for Keith Stanovich's The Robot's Rebellion sums up the book well:
The book is an excellent introduction to the first stage of Yudkowskian philosophy: We are robots in a mechanistic universe running on a swiss army knife of cognitive modules. But at least we finally noticed we're robots, and we can use the skills of rationality to hop off our habit treadmills and pursue our values instead. These values are complex and often arbitrary, but we can use our reflective capacities to extrapolate our values based on "higher-order" desires, a desire for preference consistency, and other considerations. All this is argued for at length in Stanovich's book. The only thing missing is a discussion of what to do about all this when AI arrives.