We actually do not know they are ‘doing just fine’. Many insect species have gone extinct already (speaking of ‘existential threats to them’...), and insect populations in general appear to be in substantial decline. It’s highly debated because the data is in general so bad compared to bigger stuff like mammals. Anyway:
Bees have also been seriously affected, with only half of the bumblebee species found in Oklahoma in the US in 1949 being present in 2013. The number of honeybee colonies in the US was 6 million in 1947, but 3.5 million have been lost since.
There are more than 350,000 species of beetle and many are thought to have declined, especially dung beetles. But there are also big gaps in knowledge, with very little known about many flies, ants, aphids, shield bugs and crickets. Experts say there is no reason to think they are faring any better than the studied species.
A small number of adaptable species are increasing in number, but not nearly enough to outweigh the big losses. “There are always some species that take advantage of vacuum left by the extinction of other species,” said Sanchez-Bayo. In the US, the common eastern bumblebee is increasing due to its tolerance of pesticides.
Entomologists are seeing troubling declines in insect populations beyond ants in Germany, Puerto Rico and elsewhere. Habitat destruction, pesticides and climate change contribute to this potential-but-still-debated “bugpocalypse.” Over 40 percent of insect species may go extinct, according to a 2019 study, with butterflies and beetles facing the greatest threat.
Scientists aren’t sure whether ants’ numbers are falling as well. “To be honest,” Schultheiss said, “we have no idea.”
That’s the next research question the team wants to answer. “We did not yet attempt to show this temporal shift in ant abundance,” Sabine Nooten, an insect ecologist and co-lead author of the study, said by Zoom. “That would be something that would come next.”
(That ants may not be in great shape should be no surprise given how much of the global biomass has been taken over by humans, and how jealous we are of it, and how much effort we devote to keeping ants out of it and killing them.)
I fully agree that we don’t have great information on this. But I don’t think the German example is a good one. I think its unfortunate but a lot of the biodiversity risk and extinction worries seem more smoke than light—and I do think our environment is important and we should take actions when merited.
We have people tracking extinctions and ChatGTP seems to think the estimated for species extinctions is 500 − 5000 per annum (“According to estimates by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), between 500 and 5,000 species are estimated to go extinct each year.”) which it notes is probably a poor estimate and undershooting the true number. But it also puts the estimate of new species at about 18,000 or between 10,000 and 20,000 per annum. (“The number of new species discovered each year varies depending on the taxon, region, and the level of exploration and study. However, on average, between 10,000 and 20,000 new species are discovered each year. … For example, according to estimates by the State University of New York, about 18,000 species of plants and animals are discovered each year, with about half of them being insects.”)
As related to ants specifically I will concede my comment was largely based on direct observation from my yard in the Northern Virginia area. The ant population seems to be relatively consistent for the past 30 years.
ChatGTP has this to say about ants:
Ants are a diverse group of insects, with over 14,000 known species worldwide. Some species of ants are considered to be threatened or endangered, while others are considered to be common and widespread.
The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species includes several species of ants that are considered to be endangered or critically endangered, such as the Lord Howe Island stick ant and the Christmas Island red crab ant. These species are facing threats from habitat loss and degradation, introduced species, and other human activities.
However, it is worth noting that the majority of ant species are not considered to be threatened or endangered and are considered to be common and widespread. Ants are one of the most successful and adaptable groups of insects on the planet, and they are found in a wide variety of habitats, from tropical rainforests to deserts.
That was in response to the question are they going extinct but I think “Ants are one of the most successful and adaptable groups of insects on the planet” is probably a good sign that they are still quite successful in the face of human activity.
Side notes on this. I came across an article in Wired about species thought extinct but found alive. One was a species of ants in South America (apparently wide spread at that) which had been thought extinct for 15 million years. Turned out that the ants we actually fine and just their behavior was one that probably kept them from being noticed (live very deep and only come to the surface at night).
Another group was interested in global warming impact on ants and did a comparative investigation to put ants in urban (which will have a higher temp than surrounding rural areas) to see how they coped. Well, they learned the ants adapted much more quickly that evolution could have induces and seemed to do just fine with the relocation. I can only infer that means the ants changed how they engage with their environment at their social/behavioral level rather than being a slave to genetic selection.
So while I agree that we don’t know well what the human-ant status is, if ants are going to be the example seems like we may have less to worry about than people think I suspect some of that comes from AI kills us is a much smaller set of possibilities than AI helps or AI ignores us set of possibilities.
And I hope none see this as a statement that work on safety or alignment is wasting effort or resources. I still think it’s valuable and should be done—but it may be similar to the insurance I’ve paid while not having any serious (or some cases any) damage to a car or home or someone getting injured while on my property.
But you see why ‘sure, loads of existing animal species have and will go extinct due to humans, but that’s ok from the god’s eye POV because there’s lots of new species being created or some other species can increase its numbers to occupy the now-vacant niches’ is not comforting when we are discussing the prospects of an existing species (us) if we begin to be treated the way that we treat animals is not an argument for safety, right? It is an argument for danger: you can’t even make the argument “at least it has some incentive to keep humans around to fill the niche” when that didn’t save all the previous species who went extinct, because their niche was simply filled by an existing or new species. It does us no good if a successor AI civilization maintains the total amount of biomass roughly as it is but the winning species is cockroaches or dogs or chimpanzees or something (or some humans survive in a bunker somewhere, barely hanging on), which is the Outside View of what humans have done to other species thus far: wiped out large swathes, often quite arbitrarily (sometimes based literally on fashion trends), and replaced them, if at all, with some other species. If that happened again, as it has happened so many times so far, that still represents a near-total zeroing out of the value of the future for humans. And humans are what I care about, not hypothetical neo-cockroaches optimally adapted for living off datacenter heat vents.
The question to me is just why the human species would be the one that goes extinct. It could happen, accidentally or intentionally. But why? Are we going to be competing in some niche with the new AI species? I don’t quite see that. Would they change the environment in some way that is incompatible with humans, intentionally or just that’s their pollution? Yes, maybe. Would the possible crowd us out of your habitat? That seems rather unlikely for two reasons. Humans can survive in a lot of different areas and have largely learned to modify their environment pretty well (clothes, shelter, heating, cooling, farming, ranching, material sciences). Second, as humans have become more informed (I won’t say more intelligent) and knowledgeable it seems we start taking actions to prevent the harms we’re doing. It’s not quite fair to only point to the bad cases of human other species relationships and ignore the positive ones.
The AI doing this to us, if it’s smarter and better informed than humans might be expected to behave similarly. That does shift the issue to some extent to what type of morality and recognition value of life AIs might have. Maybe people have already thought through that issue and have a high confidence level that AI will be very amoral and uninterested in life as a value in and of itself. If that is not the case, and we can expect AIs to show some level of morality and respect for other life then one might expect that as various type of ties emerge and relationships form more consideration would be granted.
A last note for consideration. I am not able to get a quick confirmation but my impression is that a fair amount of the species extinction is not really equivalent to all humans going extinct due to some AI. I’ll use polar bears as the example. Global warming may well drive polar bears on to land and ultimately result in none remaining. But they are fully able to breed with other bears in one sense they will not completely gone extinct (a bit like neanderthals sill have DNA walking the world in living people). The equivalent case here would be AI resulting in all white, blue-eyed people dying off. That’s not human extinction as you’re talking about. I would like to find some data that might prove a possible case but suspect that would be a major research project in its own right. I wonder if the cases where humans have actually produced an extinction equivalent to human extinction might also be cases where the number of related species was already heavily taxed by natural selective pressures and already on the way out and human impact was a last straw—so more about timing than anything.
This article in Forbes also point towards additional complications related to thinking about species extinction, as well as new species discovery.
I agree but would add that ants are actually doing just fine and human civilization has hardly been some existential threat to them.
We actually do not know they are ‘doing just fine’. Many insect species have gone extinct already (speaking of ‘existential threats to them’...), and insect populations in general appear to be in substantial decline. It’s highly debated because the data is in general so bad compared to bigger stuff like mammals. Anyway:
More:
(That ants may not be in great shape should be no surprise given how much of the global biomass has been taken over by humans, and how jealous we are of it, and how much effort we devote to keeping ants out of it and killing them.)
I fully agree that we don’t have great information on this. But I don’t think the German example is a good one. I think its unfortunate but a lot of the biodiversity risk and extinction worries seem more smoke than light—and I do think our environment is important and we should take actions when merited.
We have people tracking extinctions and ChatGTP seems to think the estimated for species extinctions is 500 − 5000 per annum (“According to estimates by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), between 500 and 5,000 species are estimated to go extinct each year.”) which it notes is probably a poor estimate and undershooting the true number. But it also puts the estimate of new species at about 18,000 or between 10,000 and 20,000 per annum. (“The number of new species discovered each year varies depending on the taxon, region, and the level of exploration and study. However, on average, between 10,000 and 20,000 new species are discovered each year. … For example, according to estimates by the State University of New York, about 18,000 species of plants and animals are discovered each year, with about half of them being insects.”)
As related to ants specifically I will concede my comment was largely based on direct observation from my yard in the Northern Virginia area. The ant population seems to be relatively consistent for the past 30 years.
ChatGTP has this to say about ants:
That was in response to the question are they going extinct but I think “Ants are one of the most successful and adaptable groups of insects on the planet” is probably a good sign that they are still quite successful in the face of human activity.
Side notes on this. I came across an article in Wired about species thought extinct but found alive. One was a species of ants in South America (apparently wide spread at that) which had been thought extinct for 15 million years. Turned out that the ants we actually fine and just their behavior was one that probably kept them from being noticed (live very deep and only come to the surface at night).
Another group was interested in global warming impact on ants and did a comparative investigation to put ants in urban (which will have a higher temp than surrounding rural areas) to see how they coped. Well, they learned the ants adapted much more quickly that evolution could have induces and seemed to do just fine with the relocation. I can only infer that means the ants changed how they engage with their environment at their social/behavioral level rather than being a slave to genetic selection.
So while I agree that we don’t know well what the human-ant status is, if ants are going to be the example seems like we may have less to worry about than people think I suspect some of that comes from AI kills us is a much smaller set of possibilities than AI helps or AI ignores us set of possibilities.
And I hope none see this as a statement that work on safety or alignment is wasting effort or resources. I still think it’s valuable and should be done—but it may be similar to the insurance I’ve paid while not having any serious (or some cases any) damage to a car or home or someone getting injured while on my property.
But you see why ‘sure, loads of existing animal species have and will go extinct due to humans, but that’s ok from the god’s eye POV because there’s lots of new species being created or some other species can increase its numbers to occupy the now-vacant niches’ is not comforting when we are discussing the prospects of an existing species (us) if we begin to be treated the way that we treat animals is not an argument for safety, right? It is an argument for danger: you can’t even make the argument “at least it has some incentive to keep humans around to fill the niche” when that didn’t save all the previous species who went extinct, because their niche was simply filled by an existing or new species. It does us no good if a successor AI civilization maintains the total amount of biomass roughly as it is but the winning species is cockroaches or dogs or chimpanzees or something (or some humans survive in a bunker somewhere, barely hanging on), which is the Outside View of what humans have done to other species thus far: wiped out large swathes, often quite arbitrarily (sometimes based literally on fashion trends), and replaced them, if at all, with some other species. If that happened again, as it has happened so many times so far, that still represents a near-total zeroing out of the value of the future for humans. And humans are what I care about, not hypothetical neo-cockroaches optimally adapted for living off datacenter heat vents.
The question to me is just why the human species would be the one that goes extinct. It could happen, accidentally or intentionally. But why? Are we going to be competing in some niche with the new AI species? I don’t quite see that. Would they change the environment in some way that is incompatible with humans, intentionally or just that’s their pollution? Yes, maybe. Would the possible crowd us out of your habitat? That seems rather unlikely for two reasons. Humans can survive in a lot of different areas and have largely learned to modify their environment pretty well (clothes, shelter, heating, cooling, farming, ranching, material sciences). Second, as humans have become more informed (I won’t say more intelligent) and knowledgeable it seems we start taking actions to prevent the harms we’re doing. It’s not quite fair to only point to the bad cases of human other species relationships and ignore the positive ones.
The AI doing this to us, if it’s smarter and better informed than humans might be expected to behave similarly. That does shift the issue to some extent to what type of morality and recognition value of life AIs might have. Maybe people have already thought through that issue and have a high confidence level that AI will be very amoral and uninterested in life as a value in and of itself. If that is not the case, and we can expect AIs to show some level of morality and respect for other life then one might expect that as various type of ties emerge and relationships form more consideration would be granted.
A last note for consideration. I am not able to get a quick confirmation but my impression is that a fair amount of the species extinction is not really equivalent to all humans going extinct due to some AI. I’ll use polar bears as the example. Global warming may well drive polar bears on to land and ultimately result in none remaining. But they are fully able to breed with other bears in one sense they will not completely gone extinct (a bit like neanderthals sill have DNA walking the world in living people). The equivalent case here would be AI resulting in all white, blue-eyed people dying off. That’s not human extinction as you’re talking about. I would like to find some data that might prove a possible case but suspect that would be a major research project in its own right. I wonder if the cases where humans have actually produced an extinction equivalent to human extinction might also be cases where the number of related species was already heavily taxed by natural selective pressures and already on the way out and human impact was a last straw—so more about timing than anything.
This article in Forbes also point towards additional complications related to thinking about species extinction, as well as new species discovery.