1 Big tech companies would create massive ant farms to harvest the technology.
2 Maybe people would discover a way of trapping them in a home-sized device, like a quite big computer, somehow cleverly using ant poison (with some input where you dropped in food).
3. Scientists would start investigating other species to see if this change occurred in other place.
4. Some might investigate ant EMs—easier to simulate ants than humans? (But maybe not at the required scale of millions of ants)
5. More tourism to areas with lots of ants
6. It would be much harder to deal with the ant in our house...
7. The big colony itself might try to hide underground or out of sight while plotting.
8. Colonies might seek to fuse with one another to obtain more intelligence.
9. Rationalists would try to understand ant takeoff speeds to estimate the risk of the situation going really bad.
10. Some people might investigate ways of boosting ant power, like what interface could one build to connect them to tools?
11. Interviewers and others would try to download ant wisdom. I wonder what ant colonies know that no human does.
12 Come colonies might blackmail humans, and threaten to overrun their houses unless some demand is met.
13 Potentially colonies could be used as a more secure way of sending messages.
14 Animal rights activists would push strongly for various forms of protective measures on ants, and also plausibly use the moment to argue that the same might be true of other ants; or just generally leverage to increased sympathy(?) to push other agendas.
15 Could ant colonies be used for storage of information? How effective would that be?
16 Some companies might try to build ant colony APIs like the GPT3 API
17 It becomes much harder for humans to protect ant desirable foods; and so ant-poison-laced-protective-fridges, and more, are invented.
18 For ant colonies to become part of society they would need some sort of property rights, and ability to e.g. own money. It is unclear how these would be enforced.
19 Colonies would compose ant music.
20 Would colonies try to obtain faster means of transportation? What could that be? Unlike human hands, it’s hard for them to interface with the world in that way...
21 Some scheming humans would try to form alliances with the ants to gain power together, drawing upon the ant intelligence in exchange for human mobility and ability to interface with tools.
22 Scientists looking into how ants can do so much computation with so few ants compared to neurons in the human brain.
23 Books and movies about ant<>human romance (or conflict, discrimination, etc)??
What are ants like, what characterises them...
Distributed
Lots of tiny things
Can carry heavy loads
Energy efficient
24 Apparently there’s a million billion ants in the world. So it seems that if colonies could successfully combine there would be enough of them lying around that they could achieve a decisive strategic advantage over humans.
25 AI safety folks trying to initiate anti-combining measures. They have the advantage of being able to move faster and having more advanced tools than ants. Can start by mapping known colonies across the world.
26 Then moving to sealing off abilities for them to connect. Maybe running long underground walls of ant-poison through key potential connection points between colonies.
27 Creating an ant virus that causes infertility and spreading it across the population.
28 If the ant colony could do science, it might try to do science and figure out how it works itself.
29 Armed with that knowledge, it might initiate selective breeding, and try to change itself in a particular direction, maybe to be faster, smaller, less vulnerable to standard ant poison, or something else.
30 Some country declares a “war on ants” after being alerted to the dangers.
31 Would there be any attempts at aligning ant colonies? What on earth would that even look like? A big recursive Paul Christiano scheme of interlocking colonies...?
32 Maybe as an attack, ants would cut houses off from the internet and/or electricity? For wifi they could maybe form a physical barrier surrounding the receiver (not sure it would work), or they could just chew through cables
33 Another attack might be sacrificing parts of the colony to clog up water pipes. Or, they don’t even need to sacrifice parts, they could just find stuff elsewhere and then carry it to the pipe and fill it up with it.
34 Ant colonies start to mostly operate during the night, hidden in the darkness.
35 Humans might create a mutation which is fluorescent, but also really desirable to mate with for other ants. (Locally they’re not intelligent, so humans might be able to exploit Moloch-style dynamics.) It now gets much harder for ants to hide.
36 Ant colonies might stage some pretty gruesome attacks on humans (cue ant horror movie clips), in order to instill fear in the population.
37 Since ants can carry loads much heavier than their own bodyweight, they might try to make money through freight or delivery services.
38 Ants might pretend to cooperate with humans, in order to e.g. get a meeting with the president, but in secret ants are cooperating with human bioterrorists who have built a virus that’s transmissible through ants to humans.
39 If a country declares war on ants, small ant Guerilla groups might crop up, and locally take a bunch of rural houses/people hostage.
40 Are there optimal temperatures for ants? If there is, maybe that could be leveraged as a defense mechanism by humans?
41 Ants try to smuggle themselves onboard starlink satellite launch, in order to intercept and replace broadcasts with subtle ant propaganda
42 If the ant colony does its computation via individual ants following strong pheromones (heard that somewhere, no clue if it’s right), then humans might try to place super strong/confusing odours as a means to mess up those signals.
43 Humans might try to create tiny ant robots that are sufficiently-persuasive-super-stimuli to local ants to destabilise the computation as a whole.
44 Ant colonies might specialise in obtaining and selling intelligence; e.g. by sneaking into houses and spying on inhabitants.
45 Ants might seek to make their way into nuclear power plants or nuclear weapon storage facilities, take over them, and then blackmail humans.
46 How fast do ants reproduce? One early strategy might to just go to an airport, send a few hundred ones one different planes—small enough that no one would really notice—and start offspring colonies in other locations in the world.
47 It seems one of the major bottlenecks on ant communcation is transmission of information, which either occurs at ant walking speed or pheromone transmission speed. So ants make seek ways of communicating via fiber optics. If they can already simulate a human at current information transmission constraints, that might just be enough to make them superintelligent.
48 Ant colonies might attempt to destabilise ant poison supply chain… though maybe ant poison is really easy to make and this would be too hard?
49 Human cities might install super loud anti ant-noises from public loudspeakers, that are still outside the hearing range of humans.
50 Some organisations try to negotiate a peace treaty between ants and humans.
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1 Big tech companies would create massive ant farms to harvest the technology.
2 Maybe people would discover a way of trapping them in a home-sized device, like a quite big computer, somehow cleverly using ant poison (with some input where you dropped in food).
3. Scientists would start investigating other species to see if this change occurred in other place.
4. Some might investigate ant EMs—easier to simulate ants than humans? (But maybe not at the required scale of millions of ants)
5. More tourism to areas with lots of ants
6. It would be much harder to deal with the ant in our house...
7. The big colony itself might try to hide underground or out of sight while plotting.
8. Colonies might seek to fuse with one another to obtain more intelligence.
9. Rationalists would try to understand ant takeoff speeds to estimate the risk of the situation going really bad.
10. Some people might investigate ways of boosting ant power, like what interface could one build to connect them to tools?
11. Interviewers and others would try to download ant wisdom. I wonder what ant colonies know that no human does.
12 Come colonies might blackmail humans, and threaten to overrun their houses unless some demand is met.
13 Potentially colonies could be used as a more secure way of sending messages.
14 Animal rights activists would push strongly for various forms of protective measures on ants, and also plausibly use the moment to argue that the same might be true of other ants; or just generally leverage to increased sympathy(?) to push other agendas.
15 Could ant colonies be used for storage of information? How effective would that be?
16 Some companies might try to build ant colony APIs like the GPT3 API
17 It becomes much harder for humans to protect ant desirable foods; and so ant-poison-laced-protective-fridges, and more, are invented.
18 For ant colonies to become part of society they would need some sort of property rights, and ability to e.g. own money. It is unclear how these would be enforced.
19 Colonies would compose ant music.
20 Would colonies try to obtain faster means of transportation? What could that be? Unlike human hands, it’s hard for them to interface with the world in that way...
21 Some scheming humans would try to form alliances with the ants to gain power together, drawing upon the ant intelligence in exchange for human mobility and ability to interface with tools.
22 Scientists looking into how ants can do so much computation with so few ants compared to neurons in the human brain.
23 Books and movies about ant<>human romance (or conflict, discrimination, etc)??
What are ants like, what characterises them...
Distributed
Lots of tiny things
Can carry heavy loads
Energy efficient
24 Apparently there’s a million billion ants in the world. So it seems that if colonies could successfully combine there would be enough of them lying around that they could achieve a decisive strategic advantage over humans.
25 AI safety folks trying to initiate anti-combining measures. They have the advantage of being able to move faster and having more advanced tools than ants. Can start by mapping known colonies across the world.
26 Then moving to sealing off abilities for them to connect. Maybe running long underground walls of ant-poison through key potential connection points between colonies.
27 Creating an ant virus that causes infertility and spreading it across the population.
28 If the ant colony could do science, it might try to do science and figure out how it works itself.
29 Armed with that knowledge, it might initiate selective breeding, and try to change itself in a particular direction, maybe to be faster, smaller, less vulnerable to standard ant poison, or something else.
30 Some country declares a “war on ants” after being alerted to the dangers.
31 Would there be any attempts at aligning ant colonies? What on earth would that even look like? A big recursive Paul Christiano scheme of interlocking colonies...?
32 Maybe as an attack, ants would cut houses off from the internet and/or electricity? For wifi they could maybe form a physical barrier surrounding the receiver (not sure it would work), or they could just chew through cables
33 Another attack might be sacrificing parts of the colony to clog up water pipes. Or, they don’t even need to sacrifice parts, they could just find stuff elsewhere and then carry it to the pipe and fill it up with it.
34 Ant colonies start to mostly operate during the night, hidden in the darkness.
35 Humans might create a mutation which is fluorescent, but also really desirable to mate with for other ants. (Locally they’re not intelligent, so humans might be able to exploit Moloch-style dynamics.) It now gets much harder for ants to hide.
36 Ant colonies might stage some pretty gruesome attacks on humans (cue ant horror movie clips), in order to instill fear in the population.
37 Since ants can carry loads much heavier than their own bodyweight, they might try to make money through freight or delivery services.
38 Ants might pretend to cooperate with humans, in order to e.g. get a meeting with the president, but in secret ants are cooperating with human bioterrorists who have built a virus that’s transmissible through ants to humans.
39 If a country declares war on ants, small ant Guerilla groups might crop up, and locally take a bunch of rural houses/people hostage.
40 Are there optimal temperatures for ants? If there is, maybe that could be leveraged as a defense mechanism by humans?
41 Ants try to smuggle themselves onboard starlink satellite launch, in order to intercept and replace broadcasts with subtle ant propaganda
42 If the ant colony does its computation via individual ants following strong pheromones (heard that somewhere, no clue if it’s right), then humans might try to place super strong/confusing odours as a means to mess up those signals.
43 Humans might try to create tiny ant robots that are sufficiently-persuasive-super-stimuli to local ants to destabilise the computation as a whole.
44 Ant colonies might specialise in obtaining and selling intelligence; e.g. by sneaking into houses and spying on inhabitants.
45 Ants might seek to make their way into nuclear power plants or nuclear weapon storage facilities, take over them, and then blackmail humans.
46 How fast do ants reproduce? One early strategy might to just go to an airport, send a few hundred ones one different planes—small enough that no one would really notice—and start offspring colonies in other locations in the world.
47 It seems one of the major bottlenecks on ant communcation is transmission of information, which either occurs at ant walking speed or pheromone transmission speed. So ants make seek ways of communicating via fiber optics. If they can already simulate a human at current information transmission constraints, that might just be enough to make them superintelligent.
48 Ant colonies might attempt to destabilise ant poison supply chain… though maybe ant poison is really easy to make and this would be too hard?
49 Human cities might install super loud anti ant-noises from public loudspeakers, that are still outside the hearing range of humans.
50 Some organisations try to negotiate a peace treaty between ants and humans.