For (1): Given the criteria outlined in their documents, ants likely outweigh everything else. There are tens of quadrillions of them, with a weight adjusted by credence of sentience on the order of 0.001 estimated from their evaluations of a few other types of insects. So current ant population would account for thousands of times more moral weight than current humanity instead of only the few dozen times more for bees.
Regarding (2): Extending moral weight to potential future populations presumably would mean that we ought to colonize the universe with something like immortal ants—or better yet, some synthetic entities that requires less resources per unit of sentience. As it is unlikely that we are the most resource-efficient way to maintain and extend this system, we should extinguish ourselves as the project nears completion to make room for more efficient entities.
True.
For (1): Given the criteria outlined in their documents, ants likely outweigh everything else. There are tens of quadrillions of them, with a weight adjusted by credence of sentience on the order of 0.001 estimated from their evaluations of a few other types of insects. So current ant population would account for thousands of times more moral weight than current humanity instead of only the few dozen times more for bees.
Regarding (2): Extending moral weight to potential future populations presumably would mean that we ought to colonize the universe with something like immortal ants—or better yet, some synthetic entities that requires less resources per unit of sentience. As it is unlikely that we are the most resource-efficient way to maintain and extend this system, we should extinguish ourselves as the project nears completion to make room for more efficient entities.