People vs. ants
There’s a weird notion in some science fiction (or in some futuristic predictions) that if super intelligent beings existed, they might view us in the same way that we view ants. The main implication is that they would show little to no interesting in talking to us. This is absurd. If ants could talk, thousands of biologists would spend a great deal of their time talking to them. I don’t think they would view us as pets either; people already try to endow our pets with as much intelligence and consciousness as possible, others campaign for their rights, etc. In general, I think boring, simplistic analogies about how higher intelligences will view (current) human-level intelligences all break down. If the situation ever arises, I think it will be new, and different, and very, very interesting.
Tags: ants, humans, super intelligent
August 5th, 2011 at 1:39 pm
Seems as though humans have spent quite a bit of time trying to understand how ants (or cats, or dogs, or developmentally disabled humans) communicate. I have always interpreted such tales (Niven had one about the astronaut suddenly and unexpectedly returning to earth watching a boy save a caterpillar) to be similes on that level.
Which makes it somewhat obvious that the interesting musings aren’t how they’ll treat us, but how we’ll treat them. We have experiences we can map to the former, even if we’re in contact with such entities right now we’re not aware of it, so we’ve no models for the latter…
August 6th, 2011 at 11:31 am
I still think both directions are interesting. In particular, I don’t see why it’s obvious that how humans treat dogs is a good analogy of how superhumans would treat humans, but that how dogs treat humans is a bad analogy of how humans would treat superhumans. It seems like either both analogies should hold or neither.
September 13th, 2011 at 9:36 am
If you like William Gibson’s futuristic/dystopian fiction, you might argue that the next stage of life is already here, and it’s corporations (substitute nation-states if you’re thinking about this during the Rennaissance, but the point is the same). Humans are to corporations as ants are to ant colonies, and arguably the ant colony is the more interesting organism (Godel Escher Bach, right?). But unfortunately for us, it’s kinda hard to have a conversation with a corporation (except possibly through the courts), and the relationships between corporations and individuals span the range from exploitative to symbiotic to relatively benign. God help us for giving corporations free speech rights.
Running with the analogy, the jump from prokaryotes to eukaryotes was a game-changer, and the jump from eukaryotes to multi-cellular organisms was another one. I think the jump to intelligent individuals that are able to form effective collectives (i.e., homo sapiens) is another such game change. I’m not sure what happens next, though.
September 14th, 2011 at 7:43 am
Hmm. The corporation analogy is interesting and a bit disturbing. My first thought was that corporations don’t have the same range of roles as humans, from artist to scientist and so on, and we’re missing the kind of corporation that would be trying to talk to ants, so to speak. However, that’s not necessarily true, since there are a lot of corporations piling money into research. Another thought is that corporations talk to humans all the time, but only to a few of them. The same might be true of any other kind of higher organism: there’d be plenty of communications with humans, but most of humanity would experience this only indirectly.
September 14th, 2011 at 9:27 am
I like this. And I rather think that corporations do talk to people. Think about the sorts of communications that we have with ants. We like to coerce them into behaving in a particular way, settle in this region and not that region, eat these substances and not those.
Yeah, I think this analogy holds.
October 23rd, 2011 at 5:22 pm
Yes, humans can talk, but they can’t yalk. Ants do communicate. and the comparison between (superior) creatures that can yalk and those that can talk may be like the comparison on earth between creatures that can talk (us) and creatures that can only communicate like ants. I can imagine one of these superior creatures after discovering us saying that if these tiny creatures could only yalk ye would be very interested in yalking with them.