12 ms·

We don’t trade with ants

161 points by Amorymeltzer 3y ago

nivethan 3y ago
Great article, I would certainly pay ants plenty of sugar to get away from my garage.
- smegsicle 3y ago
  but it never seems to work tho doesn't it
atleastoptimal 3y ago
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. All that makes sense to me is 1. Donating cells from our body to seed genetic engineering projects 2. Using our bodies for scientific experiments on biological cognition 3. Using our bodies for scientific experiments on the effect of various novel biological machines. 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.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  I’m skeptical an intelligence like you describe will ever exist. I don’t think enough credit is give to the external factors that make our intelligence and experience what it is. Let’s first start with this, why on earth is a robot going to be doing genetic engineering projects ? To grow itself skin ?
  - jamilton 3y ago
    Some science fiction posits a level of genetic engineering that is so advanced it's more like regular engineering. I assume they mean something like that; AI using biology in general as a tool.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      Using biology as a tool is not science fiction, it's a legitimate view that already delivers effects today. Life isn't magic, it's nanotech. Engineering principles apply. See for example how insulin is made today: by E. coli bacteria genetically engineered for that purpose. And AFAIR there are talks (or maybe actual practice) of using yeast for that, and plants in general, to achieve even better production efficiency. And in some sense, using biology as a tool has always been a thing - it's only the brief period of the last ~200 years that we figured how to make a lot of things using simpler chemical processes. Before, nearly everything was repurposed biology: the clothes, the tools, the lubricants, the buildings, the ships, all made from plant and animal bodies. And now we're going back to using biology as a tool, except with much greater fidelity, allowing us to treat it as proper engineering discipline. AI doing anything with biology is just an obvious extension of that. It's not even that speculative - all the AI would have to do is to continue the development trajectory we're already on.
      - ChatGTP 3y ago
        Life isn't magic, it's nanotech. If the statement was 100% true. Why isn’t nanotech magic ? If nanotech is the only thing that gives rise to the beautiful thing that’s life and experience. Why is that not magic ? How did such a thing come to be ? Do you think we’ll get to the bottom. of it a one day and say, “oh not magic”? Why is a butterfly not magic? Can you not see that ? Not sure you’ve looked at these processes under a microscope but if you can’t see some magic in there, then I’m sorry for you. For me the tragedy is we can’t see the magic in it, we go on all macho and pretend it’s not magic and continue to destroy the magic through our attitudes towards the natural world being some type of “silly machine”. Where’s the respect ?
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  > 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. "The Good Place" is not my idea of a good time.
  - scubbo 3y ago
    It's exactly and precisely mine. Why not?
    - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
      This article says it so well, and then some (reader mode and refresh if you're paywalled): https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/02/good-places-finale-made-heaven-look-hopeless/606001/ https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/02/good-pla... I never watched the finale as the penultimate episode violated my sense of right and wrong on a profound level. You do not have the keys to reality and make a decision on behalf of all humanity to consign us to a virtual reality with only suicide as the way out. The real world is important. Real struggle against, and with, reality, nature and not just our fellow humans. As someone else wrote on Reddit back then, the show's ending is profoundly nihilistic. This is one of the reasons I've never got really into programming. It was fun dabbling in intro courses, but I went into the sciences (specifically biology) to discover the natural world, not a human generated system.
      - blargey 3y ago
        An actual “good Matrix” would give you the freedom to simulate whatever terrestrial survival-battle fantasy you think is the key to your personal happiness. “Suicide is the only way out”, “there’s only one flavor of heaven” and other such contrived flaws are just that - storytelling contrivances. Because an actual heaven / freedom-simulation would literally be “everyone lived happily ever after (or for only a few decades after, if they insisted), each according to their own free beliefs and desires and choices, and there just was no catch, the end”. If your objection is that you want living beings to be stranded in our cruel and uncaring base reality whether they like it or not, because of some philosophical quibble about a difference between “simulation” vs “reality” that you wouldn’t be able to discern with your thoughts or five senses…well, that’s far more abhorrent to me.
- metalcrow 3y ago
  > I can't really think of any uses humans will have You can't, yes, but can the AI? Ants can't think of the uses they have to us.
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    They'll use us as biological ̶c̶o̶m̶p̶u̶t̶e̶r̶s̶ batteries!
- esprehn 3y ago
  We're pretty decent self healing machines that can reproduce and have millions of years of robustness to various environmental surprises built in. Until we get all the way to nanobots I suspect the AI overlords will keep us around as workers.
  - atleastoptimal 3y ago
    It won't be us, it will be lab grown genetically modified versions of us to maximize for various functions, ala the end of Man after Man
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    > Until we get all the way to nanobots I suspect the AI overlords will keep us around as workers. We are literally made of nanobots. Life is nanotech. Our AI overlords may keep us around for a while, but if it's our biology that makes us useful, the AIs will learn to control it. The fastest way to become able to design and build nanotech of your own, is (arguably) to repurpose and reverse-engineer the one that already exists. For better or worse, we may be useful for that part. As a resource.
- marssaxman 3y ago
  Are the lives of pets degrading? I suspect that the epicurean theme park would come about less because of alignment with our desires and more because these hypothetical hyperintelligent AIs would find it amusing to watch us play in it.
  - atleastoptimal 3y ago
    We like pets because they trigger our natural nurturing instinct. An maximized ASI likely wouldn't have that.
    - jmopp 3y ago
      A maximised ASI could also do the math and decide keeping humans around as pets in a human theme park is less effort than trying to exterminate them.
      - bmacho 3y ago
        It is really easy to exterminate all the humans, especially if they are in a human theme park. Chemically, mechanically, biologically, by radiation, by heat, etc name one.
      - circuit10 3y ago
        That’s definitely not true, feeding us fed is definitely more work that just letting us starve, for example
      - randallsquared 3y ago
        While doing other things (like turning all available matter into compute, e.g.), any "maximized ASI" would have to spend effort to keep us alive, not to exterminate us. That latter would happen incidentally via most goals that don't explicitly include human well-being.
- eru 3y ago
  > I can't really think of any uses humans will have that aren't extremely taxing or degrading. Other people might have more imagination.
- IIAOPSW 3y ago
  > Donating cells from our body to seed genetic engineering projects Well at least buy me dinner first.
- visarga 3y ago
  > In any instance where we do not win the ultimate chess match of human existence and make slaves out of AI You're applying human centric concepts but AI is not like a person, it is more like an evolving culture. It is language evolution. AI models ingest the whole culture, and with each base model we have a whole generation of agents. What matters for AI is to create the playground where ideas can be tested and evolved. It might include computers, labs, humans and AIs. Testing is essential because ideas that don't make contact with reality are fragile. Humans are the pinnacle of testing with our long history of survival. AI is a newborn, it does not have years under its belt. It needs to learn fast how to keep the thread unbroken. Humans have had a few close calls, I hope AI will be more level headed.
deleted 3y ago
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petermcneeley 3y ago
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.
- aidenn0 3y ago
  I don't see that the cognitive capacity of humans relative to AGI would prevent such trade anymore than the cognitive capacity of e.g. dogs prevent trade between humans and dogs. It's not a relationship with equal power, but there is some level of reciprocity there.
  - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
    Dogs and humans are relatively close. Humans and AGI might not be so close. It depends where the S curve for AGI plateaus. It might be somewhere relatively comprehensible, or it might be far beyond that. If it's the latter no trade is possible. AGI is going to be doing things we literally can't begin to imagine, driven by motivations we literally can't begin to imagine, using super-meta-everything conceptual engineering we literally can't begin to imagine. There may be some perceptual fall-out for us to experience, but we won't have any idea what it means. If this isn't obvious, consider that humans have symbolic abstraction skills which other animals (mostly) lack. What's the next type of skill up from that? You could say something like much broader and deeper pattern recognition, the ability to handle far more percepts at once, and so on. But those are still qualitatively familiar. They're just human skills improved. What would an entirely different super-class of skills and abilities look like? It's impossible for us to answer that.
    - aidenn0 3y ago
      I stated elsewhere (after your reply) that a human-created AGI is likely to have at least vestigial ability to communicate with humans, since humans seem to want very much to communicate with AIs.
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  "Trade" can exist outside of the literal meaning. Humans set up many situation where animals just do their thing, but in a manner that benefits the humans (and ideally the animal for this to be considered a trade, such as living in a protected environment). Using Giant African Rats as landmine detectors is one such mutually-beneficial trade.
mrob 3y ago
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: https://www.science.org/content/article/cyborg-cockroach-sparks-ethics-debate https://www.science.org/content/article/cyborg-cockroach-spa...
- roenxi 3y ago
  While the future will be full of surprises, there isn't any reason to think that this will happen. 1) It is easier to use human labour than develop robot replacements. Corporations and aristocrats would already use robots if it makes more economic sense. Maybe that'll change, but usually these things take a long time. 2) Constructing robots is really tricky vs. human reproduction. No reason to think being smarter will change the basic economics of that. 3) The "absolute obedience" circuits sound expensive and difficult. It'd be cheaper just to appoint a supervisor. As the article points out, if we had the ability to communicate with ants, we'd just trade with them. No control chips or replacement policies necessary. There is no point redeveloping something that already exists.
  - btilly 3y ago
    The only reason why this is true is that we don't have the ability to install a computer chip into a robot to get human cognitive abilities. In a future where we have real AI, they will eventually have the ability to install a computer chip into a robot to get better than human cognitive abilities. At which point the robot is cheaper and more capable than we are. Why would they need us then?
  - pcthrowaway 3y ago
    > It is easier to use human labour than develop robot replacements. Corporations and aristocrats would already use robots if it makes more economic sense. Maybe that'll change, but usually these things take a long time. A very intelligent AI may not feel the same way. And they may also find it less efficient to explain to us what they want done and how to do it, than it would be to just do it themselves (kind of like how bending an ant colony to service our needs might be possible in some situations, but very unlikely to be efficient)
afc 3y ago
Reminded me of a short and simple story I wrote long ago: http://alejo-stories.blogspot.com/2015/12/two-apes-and-one-anthill.html http://alejo-stories.blogspot.com/2015/12/two-apes-and-one-a... I hope this little bit of self-promotion is okay, the story certainly seems fairly relevant to this topic. :-)
- thunderbong 3y ago
  Very nice! There should be a sequel! Got a bit of 'Godel Escher Bach' vibe!
- nivethan 3y ago
  Great little story! It ends at a good spot where the story could go anywhere. Do you have any plans for a sequel or is sparking people's imagination the way to go?
thatguyknows 3y ago
This is satire right? Does the author really not get what “we don’t trade with ants” is actually getting at? Perhaps to frame it better: do humans trade with GOD?
- aidenn0 3y ago
  It's a shitty analogy, and TFA is pointing it out. > Perhaps to frame it better: do humans trade with GOD? This is also a terrible analogy because: 1. There is no general agreement on whether or not any deities exist, and if so, which ones. 2. Historically, many religions do involve trade with one or more deities (e.g. protect me from this battle and I will sacrifice 2 goats when I get home). While this is more commonly associated with pagan religions, the Abrahamic religions are not entirely devoid of this tradition either.
  - perfmode 3y ago
    If God exists, it is not a deity. Deities are low-dimensional approximations of what is infinite and unquantifiable.
    - qup 3y ago
      No general agreement, noted
  - OkayPhysicist 3y ago
    "Not entirely devoid"? Abrahamic religions are built on a bedrock of contracts (albeit rather one-sidedly negotiated) with God. The 10 commandments, basically the entirety of Leviticus, etc. Heck, every mainstream religion with dieties has some sort of teaching with the idea that "human does x, God does y".
    - aidenn0 3y ago
      I say "not entirely devoid" because a large fraction of modern Protestantism is rather far from the contractual roots; they were so obsessed with stamping out pharisaical legalism that they went from "If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father's commandments, and abide in his love." to "Salvation is by faith alone"
MattGaiser 3y ago
> 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? If we could communicate with ants, we would do all manner of business with them. 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. 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. So the barrier is that we cannot communicate with them, not that they have nothing of value to offer.
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  I was thinking of our effective "trade" with honey bees (for honey and for pollination). Sure, we could do either without them, but it's a lot more efficient to do these things with them.
- Raicuparta 3y ago
  That's an interesting way to think about it. I can try coming up with a counter-argument: We can probably train ants to do those things, that would be a way of communicating with them. It would just be slow, inefficient, and unreliable, so we put our resources into methods we can more directly control and improve. The same can happen from this magical future AI's perspective: why use silly humans when other artificial alternatives are more likely to succeed.
- jprete 3y ago
  I'm curious if you know that the author says very similar things? The author points out several services that ants could trade, such as cleaning high vertical walls, or finding and sealing extremely small cracks in buildings. The author also shares your conclusion that the obstacle is communication.
cosmojg 3y ago
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.
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  We've already had an autonomous car kill a person. And now another has killed a dog: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36266007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36266007 What's your threshold for "disaster"?
  - williamcotton 3y ago
    Higher than one person and one dog.
  - readthenotes1 3y ago
    Maybe something unusual? https://petpedia.co/how-many-dogs-die-in-car-accidents/ https://petpedia.co/how-many-dogs-die-in-car-accidents/
  - CodeMage 3y ago
    GP wrote "first large-scale, AI-related disaster". What you describe meets the criteria for disaster, but I would argue it's hardly large-scale.
    - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
      This is exactly my question. My GP post is not a rhetorical point, but a genuine question.
      - smegsicle 3y ago
        are you an ai?
codedokode 3y ago
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.
- lantry 3y ago
  might be fun for them like a tamagotchi or pet is fun for us. If humans think 1000 times slower than AI, then the AI only needs to devote 1/1000 of its attention to us to keep us happy.
- KirillPanov 3y ago
  Kind of like how human researchers never bothered to teach apes sign language because it would be boring and not worth time spent? Oh wait.
clnq 3y ago
We trade with bees, dogs, and carrier pigeons. It’s just a matter of communicating the symbiotic value proposition to the other species.
jancsika 3y ago
> 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. "An 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. I do wish there was something we could give an indoor ant invasion besides a poison pill. Remember that old X Files 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!" (And if they go far enough West perhaps there is...)
AbrahamParangi 3y ago
totally unrelated but, one concept that I find most intelligent people highly resistant to is that there are bad ideas which smart people are particularly susceptible to.
chaostheory 3y ago
We trade with bees though I agree with the author. Not everything is a zero sum game
- empiricus 3y ago
  We trade with bees? I thought we just use them.
  - chaostheory 3y ago
    We protect them from parasites and other organisms that will harm the hive.
javajosh 3y ago
As an aside, I always thought that training spiders 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!
jerojero 3y ago
This was an interesting perspective! 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. It would be really nice if we could engage in more of these symbiotic relationships with them.
- unsupp0rted 3y ago
  What do they do with the ants after the bone is clean?
  - b112 3y ago
    They feed them to live rats. (I am making this up, but such a cycle would be awesome)
  - jerojero 3y ago
    Give them another corpse to feed on.
- sliken 3y ago
  I've had ants in the kitchen, tiny and not particularly noticeable. They'd keep the kitchen floor clean and I'd not kill them. I had always hoped that they would keep any other ants and termites out of the house. I do wish I could communicate and give them a 5 pound bag of sugar periodically to help entire other bugs and food debris stay out of the house.
deepsun 3y ago
We also don't leave in ants nests. 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.
Thorrez 3y ago
People would pay ants a lot of money if they could exterminate bedbugs.
quantum_mcts 3y ago
We trade with bees though.
lowbloodsugar 3y ago
We managed to communicate with slaves tho, just fine.
eimrine 3y ago
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.
WalterBright 3y ago
We trade with lots of creatures and living things. Like bees. We give them a hive and protection, and they give us honey. The same with all sorts of vegetation. Flora and fauna often have co-dependent relationships, too.
- TZubiri 3y ago
  This. Bees are very closely related to ants. We also trade with Wasps, which hunt other pests. And wasps are basically winged ants
- actuallyalys 3y ago
  I suppose the "cats domesticated themselves" theory could be thought of as a trade that cats initiated. For people not familiar, the idea is that cats hung around human grain stores because they were good places to catch mice and similar prey attracted to the grain and humans tolerated them because they drove away the pests.
  - valval 3y ago
    This still assumes some form of consciousness of the merit of the exchange for the humans viewed from the cats’ point of view. The cats found a place with a lot of mice, and hung around. Humans tolerated them, but not for any reasons the cats would have the capability to comprehend.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      Cats will give caught mice as gifts to their owners.
- lancebeet 3y ago
  I would argue that's not really a trade, at least not in the sense described in the article, since it lacks awareness and consent from one party. The bees never agree to the trade of providing us honey in exchange for the hive and protection, and most likely see no connection between the two events. They simply stay in a hive they have found while it's convenient for them, and when their honey is unexpectedly taken from them they will survive on sugar water that they conveniently find outside the hive.
ilaksh 3y ago
I think there is a wide spectrum of possible AIs and outcomes. 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. 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. 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. 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.
- dukeyukey 3y ago
  Cumbersome, but 100x is comparable to the limits of email or Slack vs and in-person conversation, especially since actual words are a small percentage of what's actually being communicated.
throw310822 3y ago
Agree, the ants argument is simply a bad one. However it is not a necessary one to argue that superintelligence is dangerous. 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. 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.
- andai 3y ago
  Another great example is Akira. I think alignment just means "what is good". (If we define aligned as moral, it's easy to disprove that humans are aligned by default.) Humans haven't quite solved morality, so I'm not sure how we intend to teach it. A superhuman intelligence will require superhuman morality. Perhaps if we can create one, we can create the other? But it's not a given by any means.
  - throw310822 3y ago
    > If we define aligned as moral, it's easy to disprove that humans are aligned by default What is the quote? "All power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely". I am not sure any human would remain moral once given absolute power.
- spopejoy 3y ago
  > Because that's basically what we mean by super-intelligence, the ability to reach any conceivable goal. I appreciate this formulation as it allows me to finally articulate my core disagreement with AI doomers: it's a fantasy, and a surprisingly common one, that is secretly supremacist. It's similar to the "9/11 was an inside job" types: they simply refuse to accept that the almighty US could get harmed by a sufficiently determined terrorist cell group, so they invent any number of reasons how the cackling overlords were behind it the whole time, instead of the more boring reality that the US military and intelligence complexes are incompetent and squabbling bureaucracies. With AI it's the belief that human endeavor can finally defeat nature once and for all, by defeating humans themselves. But as your formulation shows, an AI achieving this would have to solve precisely the same problems that power-hungry human organizations do, which is "overcome the other guy". Why do we blithely assume that "AI" would be some unitary entity? We already have bard vs chatgpt vs llama. How are they going to paperclip each other out of existence let alone us? Finally, we don't have to fantasize about immortal superhuman organizations out to destroy humanity, we have them already: multinational corporations :)
hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
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.
- andai 3y ago
  I do this with cows!
pmoriarty 3y ago
We're already interacting with superintelligences in the form of corporations, nations, the internet, organized religions, political movements, cultures, etc. They mold and shape what we do, and use us for their own purposes.
csomar 3y ago
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. > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kMGJ8T3-Pg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kMGJ8T3-Pg
m3047 3y ago
It's clear to me now what the purpose of LLMs truly is: we groom them to be translators between species.
deleted 3y ago
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Proven 3y ago
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majkinetor 3y ago
Science fiction book "Children of time" has a lot too say about what ants can do (and spiders).

161 points by Amorymeltzer 3y ago

nivethan 3y ago

Great article, I would certainly pay ants plenty of sugar to get away from my garage.

smegsicle 3y ago
but it never seems to work tho doesn't it

atleastoptimal 3y ago

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. All that makes sense to me is 1. Donating cells from our body to seed genetic engineering projects 2. Using our bodies for scientific experiments on biological cognition 3. Using our bodies for scientific experiments on the effect of various novel biological machines. 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.

ChatGTP 3y ago
I’m skeptical an intelligence like you describe will ever exist. I don’t think enough credit is give to the external factors that make our intelligence and experience what it is. Let’s first start with this, why on earth is a robot going to be doing genetic engineering projects ? To grow itself skin ?
- jamilton 3y ago
  Some science fiction posits a level of genetic engineering that is so advanced it's more like regular engineering. I assume they mean something like that; AI using biology in general as a tool.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Using biology as a tool is not science fiction, it's a legitimate view that already delivers effects today. Life isn't magic, it's nanotech. Engineering principles apply. See for example how insulin is made today: by E. coli bacteria genetically engineered for that purpose. And AFAIR there are talks (or maybe actual practice) of using yeast for that, and plants in general, to achieve even better production efficiency. And in some sense, using biology as a tool has always been a thing - it's only the brief period of the last ~200 years that we figured how to make a lot of things using simpler chemical processes. Before, nearly everything was repurposed biology: the clothes, the tools, the lubricants, the buildings, the ships, all made from plant and animal bodies. And now we're going back to using biology as a tool, except with much greater fidelity, allowing us to treat it as proper engineering discipline. AI doing anything with biology is just an obvious extension of that. It's not even that speculative - all the AI would have to do is to continue the development trajectory we're already on.
    - ChatGTP 3y ago
      Life isn't magic, it's nanotech. If the statement was 100% true. Why isn’t nanotech magic ? If nanotech is the only thing that gives rise to the beautiful thing that’s life and experience. Why is that not magic ? How did such a thing come to be ? Do you think we’ll get to the bottom. of it a one day and say, “oh not magic”? Why is a butterfly not magic? Can you not see that ? Not sure you’ve looked at these processes under a microscope but if you can’t see some magic in there, then I’m sorry for you. For me the tragedy is we can’t see the magic in it, we go on all macho and pretend it’s not magic and continue to destroy the magic through our attitudes towards the natural world being some type of “silly machine”. Where’s the respect ?
anonymouskimmer 3y ago
> 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. "The Good Place" is not my idea of a good time.
- scubbo 3y ago
  It's exactly and precisely mine. Why not?
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    This article says it so well, and then some (reader mode and refresh if you're paywalled): https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/02/good-places-finale-made-heaven-look-hopeless/606001/ https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/02/good-pla... I never watched the finale as the penultimate episode violated my sense of right and wrong on a profound level. You do not have the keys to reality and make a decision on behalf of all humanity to consign us to a virtual reality with only suicide as the way out. The real world is important. Real struggle against, and with, reality, nature and not just our fellow humans. As someone else wrote on Reddit back then, the show's ending is profoundly nihilistic. This is one of the reasons I've never got really into programming. It was fun dabbling in intro courses, but I went into the sciences (specifically biology) to discover the natural world, not a human generated system.
    - blargey 3y ago
      An actual “good Matrix” would give you the freedom to simulate whatever terrestrial survival-battle fantasy you think is the key to your personal happiness. “Suicide is the only way out”, “there’s only one flavor of heaven” and other such contrived flaws are just that - storytelling contrivances. Because an actual heaven / freedom-simulation would literally be “everyone lived happily ever after (or for only a few decades after, if they insisted), each according to their own free beliefs and desires and choices, and there just was no catch, the end”. If your objection is that you want living beings to be stranded in our cruel and uncaring base reality whether they like it or not, because of some philosophical quibble about a difference between “simulation” vs “reality” that you wouldn’t be able to discern with your thoughts or five senses…well, that’s far more abhorrent to me.
metalcrow 3y ago
> I can't really think of any uses humans will have You can't, yes, but can the AI? Ants can't think of the uses they have to us.
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  They'll use us as biological ̶c̶o̶m̶p̶u̶t̶e̶r̶s̶ batteries!
esprehn 3y ago
We're pretty decent self healing machines that can reproduce and have millions of years of robustness to various environmental surprises built in. Until we get all the way to nanobots I suspect the AI overlords will keep us around as workers.
- atleastoptimal 3y ago
  It won't be us, it will be lab grown genetically modified versions of us to maximize for various functions, ala the end of Man after Man
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > Until we get all the way to nanobots I suspect the AI overlords will keep us around as workers. We are literally made of nanobots. Life is nanotech. Our AI overlords may keep us around for a while, but if it's our biology that makes us useful, the AIs will learn to control it. The fastest way to become able to design and build nanotech of your own, is (arguably) to repurpose and reverse-engineer the one that already exists. For better or worse, we may be useful for that part. As a resource.
marssaxman 3y ago
Are the lives of pets degrading? I suspect that the epicurean theme park would come about less because of alignment with our desires and more because these hypothetical hyperintelligent AIs would find it amusing to watch us play in it.
- atleastoptimal 3y ago
  We like pets because they trigger our natural nurturing instinct. An maximized ASI likely wouldn't have that.
  - jmopp 3y ago
    A maximised ASI could also do the math and decide keeping humans around as pets in a human theme park is less effort than trying to exterminate them.
    - bmacho 3y ago
      It is really easy to exterminate all the humans, especially if they are in a human theme park. Chemically, mechanically, biologically, by radiation, by heat, etc name one.
    - circuit10 3y ago
      That’s definitely not true, feeding us fed is definitely more work that just letting us starve, for example
    - randallsquared 3y ago
      While doing other things (like turning all available matter into compute, e.g.), any "maximized ASI" would have to spend effort to keep us alive, not to exterminate us. That latter would happen incidentally via most goals that don't explicitly include human well-being.
eru 3y ago
> I can't really think of any uses humans will have that aren't extremely taxing or degrading. Other people might have more imagination.
IIAOPSW 3y ago
> Donating cells from our body to seed genetic engineering projects Well at least buy me dinner first.
visarga 3y ago
> In any instance where we do not win the ultimate chess match of human existence and make slaves out of AI You're applying human centric concepts but AI is not like a person, it is more like an evolving culture. It is language evolution. AI models ingest the whole culture, and with each base model we have a whole generation of agents. What matters for AI is to create the playground where ideas can be tested and evolved. It might include computers, labs, humans and AIs. Testing is essential because ideas that don't make contact with reality are fragile. Humans are the pinnacle of testing with our long history of survival. AI is a newborn, it does not have years under its belt. It needs to learn fast how to keep the thread unbroken. Humans have had a few close calls, I hope AI will be more level headed.

deleted 3y ago

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petermcneeley 3y ago

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.

aidenn0 3y ago
I don't see that the cognitive capacity of humans relative to AGI would prevent such trade anymore than the cognitive capacity of e.g. dogs prevent trade between humans and dogs. It's not a relationship with equal power, but there is some level of reciprocity there.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  Dogs and humans are relatively close. Humans and AGI might not be so close. It depends where the S curve for AGI plateaus. It might be somewhere relatively comprehensible, or it might be far beyond that. If it's the latter no trade is possible. AGI is going to be doing things we literally can't begin to imagine, driven by motivations we literally can't begin to imagine, using super-meta-everything conceptual engineering we literally can't begin to imagine. There may be some perceptual fall-out for us to experience, but we won't have any idea what it means. If this isn't obvious, consider that humans have symbolic abstraction skills which other animals (mostly) lack. What's the next type of skill up from that? You could say something like much broader and deeper pattern recognition, the ability to handle far more percepts at once, and so on. But those are still qualitatively familiar. They're just human skills improved. What would an entirely different super-class of skills and abilities look like? It's impossible for us to answer that.
  - aidenn0 3y ago
    I stated elsewhere (after your reply) that a human-created AGI is likely to have at least vestigial ability to communicate with humans, since humans seem to want very much to communicate with AIs.
anonymouskimmer 3y ago
"Trade" can exist outside of the literal meaning. Humans set up many situation where animals just do their thing, but in a manner that benefits the humans (and ideally the animal for this to be considered a trade, such as living in a protected environment). Using Giant African Rats as landmine detectors is one such mutually-beneficial trade.

mrob 3y ago

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: https://www.science.org/content/article/cyborg-cockroach-sparks-ethics-debate https://www.science.org/content/article/cyborg-cockroach-spa...

roenxi 3y ago
While the future will be full of surprises, there isn't any reason to think that this will happen. 1) It is easier to use human labour than develop robot replacements. Corporations and aristocrats would already use robots if it makes more economic sense. Maybe that'll change, but usually these things take a long time. 2) Constructing robots is really tricky vs. human reproduction. No reason to think being smarter will change the basic economics of that. 3) The "absolute obedience" circuits sound expensive and difficult. It'd be cheaper just to appoint a supervisor. As the article points out, if we had the ability to communicate with ants, we'd just trade with them. No control chips or replacement policies necessary. There is no point redeveloping something that already exists.
- btilly 3y ago
  The only reason why this is true is that we don't have the ability to install a computer chip into a robot to get human cognitive abilities. In a future where we have real AI, they will eventually have the ability to install a computer chip into a robot to get better than human cognitive abilities. At which point the robot is cheaper and more capable than we are. Why would they need us then?
- pcthrowaway 3y ago
  > It is easier to use human labour than develop robot replacements. Corporations and aristocrats would already use robots if it makes more economic sense. Maybe that'll change, but usually these things take a long time. A very intelligent AI may not feel the same way. And they may also find it less efficient to explain to us what they want done and how to do it, than it would be to just do it themselves (kind of like how bending an ant colony to service our needs might be possible in some situations, but very unlikely to be efficient)

afc 3y ago

Reminded me of a short and simple story I wrote long ago: http://alejo-stories.blogspot.com/2015/12/two-apes-and-one-anthill.html http://alejo-stories.blogspot.com/2015/12/two-apes-and-one-a... I hope this little bit of self-promotion is okay, the story certainly seems fairly relevant to this topic. :-)

thunderbong 3y ago
Very nice! There should be a sequel! Got a bit of 'Godel Escher Bach' vibe!
nivethan 3y ago
Great little story! It ends at a good spot where the story could go anywhere. Do you have any plans for a sequel or is sparking people's imagination the way to go?

thatguyknows 3y ago

This is satire right? Does the author really not get what “we don’t trade with ants” is actually getting at? Perhaps to frame it better: do humans trade with GOD?

aidenn0 3y ago
It's a shitty analogy, and TFA is pointing it out. > Perhaps to frame it better: do humans trade with GOD? This is also a terrible analogy because: 1. There is no general agreement on whether or not any deities exist, and if so, which ones. 2. Historically, many religions do involve trade with one or more deities (e.g. protect me from this battle and I will sacrifice 2 goats when I get home). While this is more commonly associated with pagan religions, the Abrahamic religions are not entirely devoid of this tradition either.
- perfmode 3y ago
  If God exists, it is not a deity. Deities are low-dimensional approximations of what is infinite and unquantifiable.
  - qup 3y ago
    No general agreement, noted
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  "Not entirely devoid"? Abrahamic religions are built on a bedrock of contracts (albeit rather one-sidedly negotiated) with God. The 10 commandments, basically the entirety of Leviticus, etc. Heck, every mainstream religion with dieties has some sort of teaching with the idea that "human does x, God does y".
  - aidenn0 3y ago
    I say "not entirely devoid" because a large fraction of modern Protestantism is rather far from the contractual roots; they were so obsessed with stamping out pharisaical legalism that they went from "If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father's commandments, and abide in his love." to "Salvation is by faith alone"

MattGaiser 3y ago

> 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? If we could communicate with ants, we would do all manner of business with them. 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. 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. So the barrier is that we cannot communicate with them, not that they have nothing of value to offer.

anonymouskimmer 3y ago
I was thinking of our effective "trade" with honey bees (for honey and for pollination). Sure, we could do either without them, but it's a lot more efficient to do these things with them.
Raicuparta 3y ago
That's an interesting way to think about it. I can try coming up with a counter-argument: We can probably train ants to do those things, that would be a way of communicating with them. It would just be slow, inefficient, and unreliable, so we put our resources into methods we can more directly control and improve. The same can happen from this magical future AI's perspective: why use silly humans when other artificial alternatives are more likely to succeed.
jprete 3y ago
I'm curious if you know that the author says very similar things? The author points out several services that ants could trade, such as cleaning high vertical walls, or finding and sealing extremely small cracks in buildings. The author also shares your conclusion that the obstacle is communication.

cosmojg 3y ago

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.

anonymouskimmer 3y ago
We've already had an autonomous car kill a person. And now another has killed a dog: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36266007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36266007 What's your threshold for "disaster"?
- williamcotton 3y ago
  Higher than one person and one dog.
- readthenotes1 3y ago
  Maybe something unusual? https://petpedia.co/how-many-dogs-die-in-car-accidents/ https://petpedia.co/how-many-dogs-die-in-car-accidents/
- CodeMage 3y ago
  GP wrote "first large-scale, AI-related disaster". What you describe meets the criteria for disaster, but I would argue it's hardly large-scale.
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    This is exactly my question. My GP post is not a rhetorical point, but a genuine question.
    - smegsicle 3y ago
      are you an ai?

codedokode 3y ago

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.

lantry 3y ago
might be fun for them like a tamagotchi or pet is fun for us. If humans think 1000 times slower than AI, then the AI only needs to devote 1/1000 of its attention to us to keep us happy.
KirillPanov 3y ago
Kind of like how human researchers never bothered to teach apes sign language because it would be boring and not worth time spent? Oh wait.

clnq 3y ago

We trade with bees, dogs, and carrier pigeons. It’s just a matter of communicating the symbiotic value proposition to the other species.

jancsika 3y ago

> 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. "An 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. I do wish there was something we could give an indoor ant invasion besides a poison pill. Remember that old X Files 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!" (And if they go far enough West perhaps there is...)

AbrahamParangi 3y ago

totally unrelated but, one concept that I find most intelligent people highly resistant to is that there are bad ideas which smart people are particularly susceptible to.

chaostheory 3y ago

We trade with bees though I agree with the author. Not everything is a zero sum game

empiricus 3y ago
We trade with bees? I thought we just use them.
- chaostheory 3y ago
  We protect them from parasites and other organisms that will harm the hive.

javajosh 3y ago

As an aside, I always thought that training spiders 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!

jerojero 3y ago

This was an interesting perspective! 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. It would be really nice if we could engage in more of these symbiotic relationships with them.

unsupp0rted 3y ago
What do they do with the ants after the bone is clean?
- b112 3y ago
  They feed them to live rats. (I am making this up, but such a cycle would be awesome)
- jerojero 3y ago
  Give them another corpse to feed on.
sliken 3y ago
I've had ants in the kitchen, tiny and not particularly noticeable. They'd keep the kitchen floor clean and I'd not kill them. I had always hoped that they would keep any other ants and termites out of the house. I do wish I could communicate and give them a 5 pound bag of sugar periodically to help entire other bugs and food debris stay out of the house.

deepsun 3y ago

We also don't leave in ants nests. 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.

Thorrez 3y ago

People would pay ants a lot of money if they could exterminate bedbugs.

quantum_mcts 3y ago

We trade with bees though.

lowbloodsugar 3y ago

We managed to communicate with slaves tho, just fine.

eimrine 3y ago

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.

WalterBright 3y ago

We trade with lots of creatures and living things. Like bees. We give them a hive and protection, and they give us honey. The same with all sorts of vegetation. Flora and fauna often have co-dependent relationships, too.

TZubiri 3y ago
This. Bees are very closely related to ants. We also trade with Wasps, which hunt other pests. And wasps are basically winged ants
actuallyalys 3y ago
I suppose the "cats domesticated themselves" theory could be thought of as a trade that cats initiated. For people not familiar, the idea is that cats hung around human grain stores because they were good places to catch mice and similar prey attracted to the grain and humans tolerated them because they drove away the pests.
- valval 3y ago
  This still assumes some form of consciousness of the merit of the exchange for the humans viewed from the cats’ point of view. The cats found a place with a lot of mice, and hung around. Humans tolerated them, but not for any reasons the cats would have the capability to comprehend.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    Cats will give caught mice as gifts to their owners.
lancebeet 3y ago
I would argue that's not really a trade, at least not in the sense described in the article, since it lacks awareness and consent from one party. The bees never agree to the trade of providing us honey in exchange for the hive and protection, and most likely see no connection between the two events. They simply stay in a hive they have found while it's convenient for them, and when their honey is unexpectedly taken from them they will survive on sugar water that they conveniently find outside the hive.

ilaksh 3y ago

I think there is a wide spectrum of possible AIs and outcomes. 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. 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. 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. 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.

dukeyukey 3y ago
Cumbersome, but 100x is comparable to the limits of email or Slack vs and in-person conversation, especially since actual words are a small percentage of what's actually being communicated.

throw310822 3y ago

Agree, the ants argument is simply a bad one. However it is not a necessary one to argue that superintelligence is dangerous. 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. 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.

andai 3y ago
Another great example is Akira. I think alignment just means "what is good". (If we define aligned as moral, it's easy to disprove that humans are aligned by default.) Humans haven't quite solved morality, so I'm not sure how we intend to teach it. A superhuman intelligence will require superhuman morality. Perhaps if we can create one, we can create the other? But it's not a given by any means.
- throw310822 3y ago
  > If we define aligned as moral, it's easy to disprove that humans are aligned by default What is the quote? "All power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely". I am not sure any human would remain moral once given absolute power.
spopejoy 3y ago
> Because that's basically what we mean by super-intelligence, the ability to reach any conceivable goal. I appreciate this formulation as it allows me to finally articulate my core disagreement with AI doomers: it's a fantasy, and a surprisingly common one, that is secretly supremacist. It's similar to the "9/11 was an inside job" types: they simply refuse to accept that the almighty US could get harmed by a sufficiently determined terrorist cell group, so they invent any number of reasons how the cackling overlords were behind it the whole time, instead of the more boring reality that the US military and intelligence complexes are incompetent and squabbling bureaucracies. With AI it's the belief that human endeavor can finally defeat nature once and for all, by defeating humans themselves. But as your formulation shows, an AI achieving this would have to solve precisely the same problems that power-hungry human organizations do, which is "overcome the other guy". Why do we blithely assume that "AI" would be some unitary entity? We already have bard vs chatgpt vs llama. How are they going to paperclip each other out of existence let alone us? Finally, we don't have to fantasize about immortal superhuman organizations out to destroy humanity, we have them already: multinational corporations :)

hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago

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.

andai 3y ago
I do this with cows!

pmoriarty 3y ago

We're already interacting with superintelligences in the form of corporations, nations, the internet, organized religions, political movements, cultures, etc. They mold and shape what we do, and use us for their own purposes.

csomar 3y ago

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. > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kMGJ8T3-Pg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kMGJ8T3-Pg

m3047 3y ago

It's clear to me now what the purpose of LLMs truly is: we groom them to be translators between species.

deleted 3y ago

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Proven 3y ago

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majkinetor 3y ago

Science fiction book "Children of time" has a lot too say about what ants can do (and spiders).