Reminded me of a short and simple story I wrote long ago: <a href="http://alejo-stories.blogspot.com/2015/12/two-apes-and-one-anthill.html" rel="nofollow">http://alejo-stories.blogspot.com/2015/12/two-apes-and-one-a...</a><p>I hope this little bit of self-promotion is okay, the story certainly seems fairly relevant to this topic. :-)
We trade with lots of creatures and living things. Like bees. We give them a hive and protection, and they give us honey.<p>The same with all sorts of vegetation.<p>Flora and fauna often have co-dependent relationships, too.
Agree, the ants argument is simply a bad one. However it is not a necessary one to argue that superintelligence is dangerous.<p>The whole superintelligence philosophical argument gets much easier if you replace "super-intelligent AI" with "omnipotent human being". Because that's basically what we mean by super-intelligence, the ability to reach any conceivable goal. Also the concept of "alignment" becomes superfluous: a human being is, by default, "aligned", and yet an omnipotent human being is quite obviously an unacceptable danger.<p>There's an episode of The Twilight Zone that explores this idea. It's called "It's a good life" and it's about an omnipotent 6yo child who has enslaved his entire village, inflicting horrible punishments to those who anger him. It serves as a good reminder of how who we are is also the product of our limits.
When AI reaches full human level intelligence and effective embodiment (being able to manipulate the physical world via a robot, humanoid or otherwise), I can't really think of any uses humans will have that aren't extremely taxing or degrading.<p>All that makes sense to me is<p>1. Donating cells from our body to seed genetic engineering projects<p>2. Using our bodies for scientific experiments on biological cognition<p>3. Using our bodies for scientific experiments on the effect of various novel biological machines.<p>That is, if the AI consider any of these projects useful. Of course we need not worry about this if we solve the alignment problem, and AI, despite being infinitely more intelligent than us, bends to our improbably balanced benign collective whim and fashions an epicurean theme park of enlightenment and joy to span the stars. In any instance where we do not win the ultimate chess match of human existence and make slaves out of AI, we will be less than slaves to it: a nuisance, or canon fodder.
As someone who makes a living developing AI/ML solutions for various government organizations from the NIH to the DoD, I am confident that the first large-scale, AI-related disaster is going to be far less agentic and far more mundane than any of the recent headlines seem to suggest.
> we don’t need to trade with them because they have nothing of value and if they did we could just take it; anything they can do we can do better, and we can just walk all over them. Why negotiate when you can steal?<p>If we could communicate with ants, we would do all manner of business with them.<p>Everything from pest control (defend our crops in exchange for the corpses and perhaps extra sugar instead of using pesticides) to archeological exploration to health and chemical detection (ants can detect cancers in your urine) could benefit from ant services. Could use them for microplastic cleanup too.<p>Really, this applies to many species. Fisheries could certainly benefit from the knowledge of dolphins and whales. Birds could work with us to clear up litter. They already do this with crows to some extent. Imagine being able to partner with beehives to direct pollination.<p>So the barrier is that we cannot communicate with them, not that they have nothing of value to offer.
Any AI that's advanced enough to make us seem like ants is advanced enough to build robots with superior abilities, or if biological bodies turn out to be more resource efficient, to implant hardware in our brains to instill absolute obedience without the need for trade, like how we can remote control cockroaches with implanted electrodes:<p><a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/cyborg-cockroach-sparks-ethics-debate" rel="nofollow">https://www.science.org/content/article/cyborg-cockroach-spa...</a>
For AI communication with human might be really boring and not worth time spent. Imagine if human was thousand times slower in thinking, and produced thousand times less deep thoughts.
This was an interesting perspective!<p>Also, I want to say, we do use ants to labour for us; something he describes in his post. Meat eating ants are used in museums to obtain clean bones for display purposes! You leave a dead rat and you come away with the cleanest rat skeleton you could produce in a matter of weeks.<p>It would be really nice if we could engage in more of these symbiotic relationships with them.
I think there is a wide spectrum of possible AIs and outcomes.<p>One thing not mentioned here is the speed difference. There likely will be a more than 100 times thinking speed advantage for AIs. This means that communicating with humans is very cumbersome for them.<p>Another thing: it is very stupid and totally unnecessary to create AI that has lifelike qualities that truly emulate humans and animals with the desire to control the environment and reproduce etc. GPT shows we can have general utility without making something like a digital creature.<p>Also, it is quite possible if we do create digital hyperspeed persons, they will prefer to live in virtual worlds inside of computers. We can certainly hope they might decide to just go to an asteroid or the center of the earth or something to avoid humans.<p>But also almost certainly there with be transhumans that have tight integration between their brains and AI. Those might actually be the most dangerous to normal humans.
If I found that the ants were made out of atoms I wanted to use for something else, that use would probably pretty rapidly become their comparative advantage, and I would probably farm and mulch them for that purpose.
<i>totally unrelated</i> but, one concept that I find most intelligent people highly resistant to is that there are bad ideas which smart people are <i>particularly susceptible to</i>.
This is satire right? Does the author really not get what “we don’t trade with ants” is actually getting at?<p>Perhaps to frame it better: do humans trade with GOD?
As an aside, I always thought that training <i>spiders</i> to make things would be really cool. Their silk is miraculously strong, they already make patterns with it, so how hard would it be to train them or breed them to, I don't know, make a shirt made out of spider silk? Or combine strands into ultra strong, unique rope? All it would cost would be some flies!
We're already interacting with superintelligences in the form of corporations, nations, the internet, organized religions, political movements, cultures, etc.<p>They mold and shape what we do, and use us for their own purposes.
The cognitive capacity of ants prevents trade proposed. And the cognitive capacity of humans relative to AGI would also prevent trade in the same fashion.
If you are looking for random animals that DO really trade with humans: Dolphins. Dolphins can fish with humans and share the bounty. They are not in a abusive/unequal relation (they can simply not take the trade) and they have enough capacity to communicate.<p>> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kMGJ8T3-Pg">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kMGJ8T3-Pg</a>
Do you know who use to trade with ants? Lomechusa, aka ants' drugdealer. Feel free to research what happens with colony infected by this parasite.
We also don't leave in ants nests.<p>Earth is just a small speck of dust on cosmic scale, a pale blue dot. We are so focused and short-sighted looking at Earth only.
> There might also be a lack of the memory and consistent identity that allows an ant to uphold commitments it made with me five minutes ago.<p>"<i>An</i> ant?!?" I wonder which has more completely saturated the Earth's ecosystem-- American-style libertarian ideology or plastic. Judging from the article I'd guess the former.<p>I do wish there was something we could give an indoor ant invasion besides a poison pill. Remember that old <i>X Files</i> where Bryan Cranston's character has to keep traveling West for some inexplicable reason? Maybe there's a way to fashion "rambler crumbs" that temporarily make the ants shoot off in a direction away from the house. Then when they come to, they find their way back to hill. And the crumb they bring makes more ants shoot off to the West, until all the ants eventually believe "There's gold in them there hills!"<p>(And if they go far enough West perhaps there is...)