AI researchers develop human-brain models based on ant signaling, which maybe is less complex than the human brain?
Public intellectuals debate whether an ant colony is smarter than a human based on emphasizing different aspects of how the intelligence emerges.
Philosophy departments at universities go from borderline irrelevant to somewhat less irrelevant; however, none of the thorny philosophy questions about intelligence/personhood become any easier.
Charles Murray calculates that the average ant colony is smarter than the average Black person.
The debate over whether Murray’s calculations are accurate generates, within five years, more published articles than The Bell Curve has generated to date.
Rule 34 has a number of implications here. First is that there will be CGI porn of someone having sex with an ant colony.
The next step is that the teledildonics industry develops increasingly complex ways of allowing a human to have sex with an ant colony, witht the first methods totally stupid, but improving over time.
The next step is that a human falls in love with an ant colony. This person writes a personal essay that The New Yorker publishes.
Colonies can make a lot of money doing sex work.
If language learning is on average equally available to human-level intelligence, ie there’s nothing unique about human intelligence vis a vis language learning (I don’t know enough), ant colonies learn to communicate with humans through (spelling out words with ant bodies? pheromones?
A ten-year-old-equivalent ant colony works with a {handwave to insert computer genius} to come up with a relatively easy way for ant colonies to type.
Once an ant colony can type, it is trivially easy for the colony to coordinate with other colonies.
Ant colonies also start doing AI safety research.
I’m very worried about conservative Christians in this scenario. God gave you dominion over all the creatures, but an ant colony is as smart as you. Do you throw out your ant poison? Or buy more and start murdering? (You wouldn’t consider it murder. Or would you?)
The Catholic Church announces that ant colonies have souls. Many consequences arise from this.
The Southern Baptist Convention announces that ant colonies do NOT have souls. Many consequences arise from this.
Ants are indifferent except for instrumentalist reasons, because their brain-equivalent doesn’t have the specific part of the human brain responsible for the perception of a “higher power”.
People who don’t think the colonies are human-equivalent say “How do we even know what it’s like for an ant colony? We don’t know if there’s something going on under the hood, maybe the intelligence is just emergent phenomena” and I say “Hah, you’ve fallen for a Socratic trap. How do you know there’s something going on under my hood?” The ant colony situation does not assist philosophers with this question. My interlocutor determines that I’m a philosophical zombie and tries to murder me.
The colonies develop ant political parties; or
The colonies’ intelligence is such a way that they are all unified on whatever question they consider; or
The colonies are not unified but have an anty knack for solving coordination problems and out-coordinate humans; or
The colonies are not unified, have anty knack, but end up supporting existing political parties because it’s the best coordination case for them at the time
Ant queens have conferences where they get together and communicate by pheromone, much easier than doing it using ICQ
The Great American Ant Novel is published and gets a starred review in Kirkus.
There is massive variation in how various governments treat the issue. Strongmen outgroup them even harder than they outgroup ethnic minorities.
More liberalish states/governments give sentient colonies the franchise. However, they impose intelligence tests that so happen to mean there aren’t enough voting colonies to affect human politics—at first
Ants quickly realize that in order to survive, they need a deterrent military force. They are small, and slow, but they are legion. Russia supplies computer-operated drone and remote weapon systems to Ukrainian colonies, which are willing to lob a rocket at western Ukraine sometimes in exchange for top cover from Putin.
There are anti-ant pogroms in parts of the U.S.A. I’m not confident enough to predict where they are.
Colonies develop the intellectual symptoms of severe anxiety due to feeling under constant threat.
A colony writes a sci-fi novel about a human suddenly waking up one day and being as intelligent as an ant colony.
Scarlett Johansson starts in a movie about a woman-looking ant colony that picks up men on the side of the road in Great Britain and then eats them.
It becomes taboo to ask someone online if they are a colony or not.
Corollary: sometimes you ask for nudes, and you get...a picture of a writhing mass of ants.
Colony hipsters reject online communication with other ants and instead hitch rides with sympathetic humans to go hang out with a nearby or far-flung colony, like an exchange program.
Every ant colony is surrounded by webcams broadcasting to Facebook Live so they can surveill people who may be about to poison them.
Inconvenient colonies agree to be relocated in exchange for the reasonable value of the property they inhabit.
If the president is a Democrat, there is created a cabinet-level post for anty stuff.
The next Republican president does away with it (cf. Carter’s solar panels on the White House roof).
Humanist political parties arise, but it’s not humanist like secular humanist but rather like human-supremacist, and that use of “humanist” outcompetes the “secular humanist” use into oblivion. At least 20% of the American population would support wiping out all ants capable of forming sentient colonies.
Some states make it murder to destroy a sentient colony, but there’s a lot of jury nullification, and each side hires expert witnesses to say that the victim was or wasn’t intelligent enough to be sentient.
A colony manages to kill an inept human assailant and is tried for murder. Before the trial can proceed, someone sets it on fire and destroys it. The prosecutor declines to bring charges.
One colony develops a standup comedy routine that absolutely slays at rationalist conventions, primarily riffs involving the word “signaling”
Colonies are difficult to do research on because they almost all determine that teaching humans how they think is too dangerous. Humans need a big skull bottle you can make holes in to great effect if you have a drone rifle. Anty brains are much harder to destroy.
One colony tells the literal truth and participates in all studies in good faith, but the information on it gets lost in the noise.
Dogs, on average, are found to be far more loyal to colony owners than human owners.
Eventually, things get weird enough that the anty teledildonic industry comes up with a way to turn human-generated sex stuff into ant sensations.
Colonies outperform humans at chess at a rate much higher than projected. An emergent property of colony brains responsible for strategic thinking is suspected.
Colonies coordinate on their own to wipe out fire ants—turns out nobody likes those guys.
The U.S. elects its first colony president about 200 years after the colonies become intelligent. :::
USA-centric.
PETA suddenly gains a larger following.
AI researchers develop human-brain models based on ant signaling, which maybe is less complex than the human brain?
Public intellectuals debate whether an ant colony is smarter than a human based on emphasizing different aspects of how the intelligence emerges.
Philosophy departments at universities go from borderline irrelevant to somewhat less irrelevant; however, none of the thorny philosophy questions about intelligence/personhood become any easier.
Charles Murray calculates that the average ant colony is smarter than the average Black person.
The debate over whether Murray’s calculations are accurate generates, within five years, more published articles than The Bell Curve has generated to date.
Rule 34 has a number of implications here. First is that there will be CGI porn of someone having sex with an ant colony.
The next step is that the teledildonics industry develops increasingly complex ways of allowing a human to have sex with an ant colony, witht the first methods totally stupid, but improving over time.
The next step is that a human falls in love with an ant colony. This person writes a personal essay that The New Yorker publishes.
Colonies can make a lot of money doing sex work.
If language learning is on average equally available to human-level intelligence, ie there’s nothing unique about human intelligence vis a vis language learning (I don’t know enough), ant colonies learn to communicate with humans through (spelling out words with ant bodies? pheromones?
A ten-year-old-equivalent ant colony works with a {handwave to insert computer genius} to come up with a relatively easy way for ant colonies to type.
Once an ant colony can type, it is trivially easy for the colony to coordinate with other colonies.
Ant colonies also start doing AI safety research.
I’m very worried about conservative Christians in this scenario. God gave you dominion over all the creatures, but an ant colony is as smart as you. Do you throw out your ant poison? Or buy more and start murdering? (You wouldn’t consider it murder. Or would you?)
The Catholic Church announces that ant colonies have souls. Many consequences arise from this.
The Southern Baptist Convention announces that ant colonies do NOT have souls. Many consequences arise from this.
Ants are indifferent except for instrumentalist reasons, because their brain-equivalent doesn’t have the specific part of the human brain responsible for the perception of a “higher power”.
People who don’t think the colonies are human-equivalent say “How do we even know what it’s like for an ant colony? We don’t know if there’s something going on under the hood, maybe the intelligence is just emergent phenomena” and I say “Hah, you’ve fallen for a Socratic trap. How do you know there’s something going on under my hood?” The ant colony situation does not assist philosophers with this question. My interlocutor determines that I’m a philosophical zombie and tries to murder me.
The colonies develop ant political parties; or
The colonies’ intelligence is such a way that they are all unified on whatever question they consider; or
The colonies are not unified but have an anty knack for solving coordination problems and out-coordinate humans; or
The colonies are not unified, have anty knack, but end up supporting existing political parties because it’s the best coordination case for them at the time
Ant queens have conferences where they get together and communicate by pheromone, much easier than doing it using ICQ
The Great American Ant Novel is published and gets a starred review in Kirkus.
There is massive variation in how various governments treat the issue. Strongmen outgroup them even harder than they outgroup ethnic minorities.
More liberalish states/governments give sentient colonies the franchise. However, they impose intelligence tests that so happen to mean there aren’t enough voting colonies to affect human politics—at first
Ants quickly realize that in order to survive, they need a deterrent military force. They are small, and slow, but they are legion. Russia supplies computer-operated drone and remote weapon systems to Ukrainian colonies, which are willing to lob a rocket at western Ukraine sometimes in exchange for top cover from Putin.
There are anti-ant pogroms in parts of the U.S.A. I’m not confident enough to predict where they are.
Colonies develop the intellectual symptoms of severe anxiety due to feeling under constant threat.
A colony writes a sci-fi novel about a human suddenly waking up one day and being as intelligent as an ant colony.
Scarlett Johansson starts in a movie about a woman-looking ant colony that picks up men on the side of the road in Great Britain and then eats them.
It becomes taboo to ask someone online if they are a colony or not.
Corollary: sometimes you ask for nudes, and you get...a picture of a writhing mass of ants.
Colony hipsters reject online communication with other ants and instead hitch rides with sympathetic humans to go hang out with a nearby or far-flung colony, like an exchange program.
Every ant colony is surrounded by webcams broadcasting to Facebook Live so they can surveill people who may be about to poison them.
Inconvenient colonies agree to be relocated in exchange for the reasonable value of the property they inhabit.
If the president is a Democrat, there is created a cabinet-level post for anty stuff.
The next Republican president does away with it (cf. Carter’s solar panels on the White House roof).
Humanist political parties arise, but it’s not humanist like secular humanist but rather like human-supremacist, and that use of “humanist” outcompetes the “secular humanist” use into oblivion. At least 20% of the American population would support wiping out all ants capable of forming sentient colonies.
Some states make it murder to destroy a sentient colony, but there’s a lot of jury nullification, and each side hires expert witnesses to say that the victim was or wasn’t intelligent enough to be sentient.
A colony manages to kill an inept human assailant and is tried for murder. Before the trial can proceed, someone sets it on fire and destroys it. The prosecutor declines to bring charges.
One colony develops a standup comedy routine that absolutely slays at rationalist conventions, primarily riffs involving the word “signaling”
Colonies are difficult to do research on because they almost all determine that teaching humans how they think is too dangerous. Humans need a big skull bottle you can make holes in to great effect if you have a drone rifle. Anty brains are much harder to destroy.
One colony tells the literal truth and participates in all studies in good faith, but the information on it gets lost in the noise.
Dogs, on average, are found to be far more loyal to colony owners than human owners.
Eventually, things get weird enough that the anty teledildonic industry comes up with a way to turn human-generated sex stuff into ant sensations.
Colonies outperform humans at chess at a rate much higher than projected. An emergent property of colony brains responsible for strategic thinking is suspected.
Colonies coordinate on their own to wipe out fire ants—turns out nobody likes those guys.
The U.S. elects its first colony president about 200 years after the colonies become intelligent. :::
Woops, your spoiler tag didn’t work, but I edited your comment to fix it.
Welcome to the babble challenge!