We would immediately start trying to figure out how intelligent they are, the same way we do with other animals.
We would test how intelligence varies with age, size, ant species, geography, climate, and so on
We would test whether they can and do communicate with each other.
The search for a global cause for them becoming intelligent would get a lot of funding.
If it happened spontaneously, and one became intelligent and somehow spread that to others very rapidly, we’d try to figure out if the same could happen in other eusocial species, like bees.
If a human somehow made this happen, they’d win a lot of accolades and even more condemnations.
Otherwise, a third intelligence would need to be active on Earth. SETI would get a lot of funding.
Interspecies communication research would become a high priority, since ants are much more directly relevant to human life than other intelligent species like whales, dolphins, apes, or octopods.
Learning what ant hills value becomes a huge moral imperative. Do they care (or even know) about ants? Or is killing a few ants akin to me getting a haircut?
Philosophy departments get a boost in funding for work on actually solving some of the problems of moral philosophy, including some of the important ones related to FAI, now that they’re finally confronted with actually alien intelligences.
Most people will go about their lives pretending this discovery didn’t happen, or has no moral consequences, for long enough to commit many atrocities.
Use of ant poison wouldn’t become illegal, but would be limited to professionals who know how to use it only to keep ants out of specific places, how to use the least lethal effective methods, how to use ant hill coordination and communication methods to inform them what areas to stay away from, and so on.
Ant hills become legal persons – laws and constitutions need to be rewritten to account for changes in what personhood implies, and this leads to delays, divisions, and kludges that will shape humanity’s interactions with other artificial and alien intelligences in the future.
It turns out we do live in a cosmic zoo, and how we interact with intelligent ant hills determines whether we’re allowed to continue to exist, or at least whether we’re allowed to learn about and eventually join our galactic community.
Intelligence turns out to be a network effect, proportional to ant number squared. Teaching ant hills human values and uniting them all into a global-super-hive-mind, possibly in combination with other eusocial insects, replaces AGI and AFI development work. Slow clock speed, but massively powerful and parallel.
Intelligence turns out to be a network effect, proportional to ant number squared. Genetic research to apply the same effect to human brains becomes an arms race for dominance over the Earth, forcing everyone to set aside ethical concerns over modifying humanity.
Picnics start to include dedicated plates for ant hills as a kind of offering/host gift. Ant hills learn to eat from them and leave everything else alone.
Ant hills and humans collaborate to build better ant hill homes/farms. The initialy goal is to help the ant hills flourish and grow.
In time, artificial ant hill structures effectively become robots enabling ant hills and humans to interact more directly.
Some ant hill robots join human society with full citizenship rights. Certain jobs become almost exclusively their domain, by preference (waste management?) and talent (logistics?).
Ant hill society exists in parallel to human society, with its own legal system and governing structures.
Ant hill governments join the UN, with borders unrelated to human countries.
Concept of a nation-state gets updated based on the idea of sympatric nations.
Increased need for “international” dispute resolution leads to formation and strengthening of world governing bodies.
Humans adopt the idea of sympatric nations for themselves, extending to citizenship the transformation that telecommunications and telepresence have begun. You can live anywhere and be a citizen of any “country” irrespective of what dirt you stand on.
Interaction with anyone else can potentially become an international incident. Norms of behavior shift dramatically to accommodate the fact that other people might literally operate under different laws than you.
Large scale conversions to religions that espouse beliefs that animals have souls. Buddhism, Hinduism, animism, and general beliefs involving reincarnation or past lives.
Christian religious extremists begin wars of genocide against ant hills and the humans who work with them, on the basis that God gave the Earth to *man’s* dominion.
Ant hills are highly sought after as employees: immortal, no need for sleep, increased multitasking capability, ability to do much finer manual manipulations than humans can, and able to subsist on resources that have little value to humans.
Ant hill labor becomes a major political issue; how to define slavery, exploitation, and so on, in relation to beings with non-human emotional makeup.
Interspecies sex and marriage become a significant political issue. Bestiality laws amended to account for uplift.
Ideas of sexual orientation and gender expand to account for ant hills being hermaphroditic, while individual ants are gendered, and sex is often violent and polyandrous.
Ability to exchange drones effectively enables horizontal gene flow between ant hills – genetic change of a single “individual” within its lifetime
Rule 34 takes immediate effect.
Someone shows ant hills the internet. Humans answer some very awkward questions.
Ant hills learn about exterminators and plan revenge.
Ant hills learn about exterminators but manage to forgive us
Ant hills learn about exterminators but don’t see anything wrong with us trying to kill each other. They assume that means it is okay for them to kill us for convenience, too.
Ant hills are potentially immortal, and push society towards longer-term thinking. Greater investment in the long term future, environmental stewardship, and expansion beyond Earth ensue.
Ant hills become the majority of astronauts, since they are better able to survive conditions in space and spaceships.
Ant hill colonies begin terraforming the other worlds of the solar system, mining asteroids, and preparing the way for humans to join them.
Alternatively, ant hills take over the solar system, and leave Earth and its orbit as a preserve for humans.
Humans invest heavily in Neuralink-like technologies to obtain the observed benefits of hive-mind capabilities.
Observation of immortality in ant hills leads humans to accept that they want it, too, and that wanting it isn’t evil. Greater acceptance of cryonics, more anti-aging research.
Observation of intelligence in non-human forms and without well-defined body plans increased scope of the body-modding community. Custom organs, prosthetics, and other modifications beyond more common and sophisticated.
Anteaters mysteriously go extinct.
Anteaters become domesticated animals, and/or form a symbiotic relationship with ant hills like cleaner fish with larger sea creatures.
Humans use the principles of ant hill intelligence to figure out how to uplift other species, starting with eusocial insects, then maybe naked mole rats, and continuing to trees, which think slowly but similarly benefit from chemical communication and a flexible body plan. This turns out to be much simpler increasing intelligence in individual mammals like apes, dogs, or dolphins.
Ant hills domesticate other insect species, like termites or bees, and take over key industries including landscaping, agriculture, pest control, and forestry.
Multipartite ant hill minds prove highly effective at understanding ecological systems and enable humans to better evaluate the environmental impacts of our decisions.
We would immediately start trying to figure out how intelligent they are, the same way we do with other animals.
We would test how intelligence varies with age, size, ant species, geography, climate, and so on
We would test whether they can and do communicate with each other.
The search for a global cause for them becoming intelligent would get a lot of funding.
If it happened spontaneously, and one became intelligent and somehow spread that to others very rapidly, we’d try to figure out if the same could happen in other eusocial species, like bees.
If a human somehow made this happen, they’d win a lot of accolades and even more condemnations.
Otherwise, a third intelligence would need to be active on Earth. SETI would get a lot of funding.
Interspecies communication research would become a high priority, since ants are much more directly relevant to human life than other intelligent species like whales, dolphins, apes, or octopods.
Learning what ant hills value becomes a huge moral imperative. Do they care (or even know) about ants? Or is killing a few ants akin to me getting a haircut?
Philosophy departments get a boost in funding for work on actually solving some of the problems of moral philosophy, including some of the important ones related to FAI, now that they’re finally confronted with actually alien intelligences.
Most people will go about their lives pretending this discovery didn’t happen, or has no moral consequences, for long enough to commit many atrocities.
Use of ant poison wouldn’t become illegal, but would be limited to professionals who know how to use it only to keep ants out of specific places, how to use the least lethal effective methods, how to use ant hill coordination and communication methods to inform them what areas to stay away from, and so on.
Ant hills become legal persons – laws and constitutions need to be rewritten to account for changes in what personhood implies, and this leads to delays, divisions, and kludges that will shape humanity’s interactions with other artificial and alien intelligences in the future.
It turns out we do live in a cosmic zoo, and how we interact with intelligent ant hills determines whether we’re allowed to continue to exist, or at least whether we’re allowed to learn about and eventually join our galactic community.
Intelligence turns out to be a network effect, proportional to ant number squared. Teaching ant hills human values and uniting them all into a global-super-hive-mind, possibly in combination with other eusocial insects, replaces AGI and AFI development work. Slow clock speed, but massively powerful and parallel.
Intelligence turns out to be a network effect, proportional to ant number squared. Genetic research to apply the same effect to human brains becomes an arms race for dominance over the Earth, forcing everyone to set aside ethical concerns over modifying humanity.
Picnics start to include dedicated plates for ant hills as a kind of offering/host gift. Ant hills learn to eat from them and leave everything else alone.
Ant hills and humans collaborate to build better ant hill homes/farms. The initialy goal is to help the ant hills flourish and grow.
In time, artificial ant hill structures effectively become robots enabling ant hills and humans to interact more directly.
Some ant hill robots join human society with full citizenship rights. Certain jobs become almost exclusively their domain, by preference (waste management?) and talent (logistics?).
Ant hill society exists in parallel to human society, with its own legal system and governing structures.
Ant hill governments join the UN, with borders unrelated to human countries.
Concept of a nation-state gets updated based on the idea of sympatric nations.
Increased need for “international” dispute resolution leads to formation and strengthening of world governing bodies.
Humans adopt the idea of sympatric nations for themselves, extending to citizenship the transformation that telecommunications and telepresence have begun. You can live anywhere and be a citizen of any “country” irrespective of what dirt you stand on.
Interaction with anyone else can potentially become an international incident. Norms of behavior shift dramatically to accommodate the fact that other people might literally operate under different laws than you.
Large scale conversions to religions that espouse beliefs that animals have souls. Buddhism, Hinduism, animism, and general beliefs involving reincarnation or past lives.
Christian religious extremists begin wars of genocide against ant hills and the humans who work with them, on the basis that God gave the Earth to *man’s* dominion.
Ant hills are highly sought after as employees: immortal, no need for sleep, increased multitasking capability, ability to do much finer manual manipulations than humans can, and able to subsist on resources that have little value to humans.
Ant hill labor becomes a major political issue; how to define slavery, exploitation, and so on, in relation to beings with non-human emotional makeup.
Interspecies sex and marriage become a significant political issue. Bestiality laws amended to account for uplift.
Ideas of sexual orientation and gender expand to account for ant hills being hermaphroditic, while individual ants are gendered, and sex is often violent and polyandrous.
Ability to exchange drones effectively enables horizontal gene flow between ant hills – genetic change of a single “individual” within its lifetime
Rule 34 takes immediate effect.
Someone shows ant hills the internet. Humans answer some very awkward questions.
Ant hills learn about exterminators and plan revenge.
Ant hills learn about exterminators but manage to forgive us
Ant hills learn about exterminators but don’t see anything wrong with us trying to kill each other. They assume that means it is okay for them to kill us for convenience, too.
Ant hills are potentially immortal, and push society towards longer-term thinking. Greater investment in the long term future, environmental stewardship, and expansion beyond Earth ensue.
Ant hills become the majority of astronauts, since they are better able to survive conditions in space and spaceships.
Ant hill colonies begin terraforming the other worlds of the solar system, mining asteroids, and preparing the way for humans to join them.
Alternatively, ant hills take over the solar system, and leave Earth and its orbit as a preserve for humans.
Humans invest heavily in Neuralink-like technologies to obtain the observed benefits of hive-mind capabilities.
Observation of immortality in ant hills leads humans to accept that they want it, too, and that wanting it isn’t evil. Greater acceptance of cryonics, more anti-aging research.
Observation of intelligence in non-human forms and without well-defined body plans increased scope of the body-modding community. Custom organs, prosthetics, and other modifications beyond more common and sophisticated.
Anteaters mysteriously go extinct.
Anteaters become domesticated animals, and/or form a symbiotic relationship with ant hills like cleaner fish with larger sea creatures.
Humans use the principles of ant hill intelligence to figure out how to uplift other species, starting with eusocial insects, then maybe naked mole rats, and continuing to trees, which think slowly but similarly benefit from chemical communication and a flexible body plan. This turns out to be much simpler increasing intelligence in individual mammals like apes, dogs, or dolphins.
Ant hills domesticate other insect species, like termites or bees, and take over key industries including landscaping, agriculture, pest control, and forestry.
Multipartite ant hill minds prove highly effective at understanding ecological systems and enable humans to better evaluate the environmental impacts of our decisions.