How do you give a Turing Test to an Anthill?
One day an ant in a hill near where I live—I'll call him Sam Antman—was dreaming of making a robotic Super-Ant.
Sam explained to me that he knew how to build robotic guard ants to protect the hive, who were stronger than mere insects and better at it than ordinary guard ants, who had all been fired, after outsourcing guard ants to another neighbouring hill had resulted in having to abandon the last hive, when that idea developed unexpected problems.
As we sat together on a bigger hill, near where we both live, on a pleasant summer day, blowing smoke rings and enjoying a rare break from the usual June Gloom we have in these here parts, Sam explained to me that the Queen had given him a new commission, after his success with the robotic guard-ants.
Sam had gone to the Queen and explained that the guard ants and forager ants was just a start, and he could build a Artificial General Purpose Ant (AGPA) who would do any of the various jobs of the hive, well except a couple. He had heard the Queen mutter, quietly, 'It is so noble how my workers sacrifice themselves for me and the Chief Drone'. I think, between you and me, Sam was rather hoping to become the Chief Drone himself one day. But, well, he's just an ant at heart, and very loyal to his Queen.
So Sam's work on the pursuit of AGPA succeeded wildly in fact. Solar powered general purpose robot ants could, indeed, feed the hive. Well, maybe. They were having a bit of trouble with what they called the pherome chain.
Sam explained to me in terms a human could understand: 'I was talking with the Chief Draftsman of the Hive [I'll call him Escher] who does my multidimensional robot designs, and he told me he'd managed to access the human Internet and watch a YouTube by a human worker you call Nate Hagans[1][2], and it turns out you humans have problems similar to Peak Pherome Problem and what you call the Supply Chain. And furthermore, you have an emergent Superorganism'
[1]: 32 min but watch it all https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/resources
[2]: 7 min for the impatient
'You humans are not so different from us ants. You follow dopamine trails the way we lay down pherome trails to find our way back to The Hill with our daily bread.
‘No pherome trails, no food for us, and more importantly, for the Queen, ergo no ants. What you call 'The Market'. Your saying 'let him who will not work, not eat' is well understood by every ant in the hive. Indeed, it is our purpose. What your philosophers call [i]telos[/i]. [Sam is a very well-educated ant in fact].
Sam concluded 'where we differ, is that *our* superorganism is smarter than us. But you humans seem to think the reverse is true for you!'
The long and the short of it is another ant, I'll call him Goedel, had invented a laboratory test for detecting the Artificial General Purpose Ant. Yes, ants have laboratories—after all, they are workers and have to work somewhere.
In our year A.D. 2025 (A.M. 7033 since the beginning of our universe), the ant-plan to sniff all the pheromones created by any ant in the hive, classify them (ants are actually rather good at that, probably better at scale than humans) and build a robotic ant with all the Wisdom of the Hive, which no single ant could approach—succeeded.
What happened next surprised Sam (and indeed his human counterpart in *our* Ant Hill). The ants didn't care. About the giant robotic ant capable of replacing each of them, but not all of them, standing just outside their hill, and whether their labours were general all-purpose ones, or specific to their own trade, each ant cared not one whit. They just followed their pheromone trails and went on with life, non-plussed by it all. No celebrations for the brilliant One Season Plan to create Artificial General-Purpose Ants for Our Most Glorious Queen and Hill. No hip-hip-huzzahs or whatever ants shout to create collective group spirit. No prizes and ribbons for Sam.
It is rather as though, in A.D. 2025, humans had managed to create not only an AGI, but in fact an ASI (and both have happened now)—yet no one cared. It is as if they had looked up at the sky, and suddenly the stars moved about and started to spell out words, and a giant digital clock appeared that was starting to count backwards. And yet all the humans just shrugged their shoulders and went about their merry Super-Organismic ways, high on dopamine as usual. I’m surprised the super-organism doesn’t fire the lot of them.
Meanwhile, back in Ant-Land, the Grasshopper (I'll call him Bach) was playing polyphonic sweet-sad tunes on his violin—how *do* they do that?—about the approaching end to the Eternal Summer of Ant Gore’s Inter-Ant Highway.
As the shadows lengthened towards evensong, I asked Sam, 'What next?' We had to conclude our conversation in a single day, since ants are very busy and ant time has to be even faster than internet time. After all, they have only a single season a year before Winter Comes, unlike us humans, who have a thousand years or ten between our long winters.
Sam said he'd gone to the Queen and told her she could now replace the whole Hill with solar-powered robot workers who were capable of doing absolutely everything mere worker ants could, and they didn’t need food but ran on their own power. And, in fact, that the next logical step, now within reach and perhaps already achieved in one of the ongoing worker-chamber experiments, had brought ASA—the Artificial Super-Ant (ASA)—was now within reach.
But the Queen wasn't buying it. She said, 'I don't really want a Super-Ant. I want a Super-Anthill. Then I could be done with the lot of you and make out with the Chief Drone on a nice desert island with lots of sand and no winter. Are you sure you can't make an ASAH instead of an ASA, or even an AGAH, and a Digital Twin of our Anthill? That would be quite good enough.’
Sam said to me, 'So, that's my problem. I don't know whether I should ask Goedel to draw up one of our multi-dimensional quantum tests for a Super-Ant, since we after all are mere organisms and workers for the Queen, or one for a super-organism, the whole Ant Hill.
`It appears that I succeeded in creating an AGPA, but I did it by training on the entire hive-mind, so 'superintelligence of the ant' is probably already ours. It was unexpected, being an emergent property of training on the whole ant hill. But not so surprising, considering that we trained our robotic ant on the full intelligence of the hive mind. So it's smarter than an ant... but could it be smarter than the hive itself?
'How do you even give a Goedel test to an Ant Hill? They don’t have antennae to wave or do dances to tell you which way to the next green meal-ticket, like your human blockchains. Do we need to capture all the other Ant Hills with robotic guard ants and enslave them, just to get access to *their* high value training data? Can we train on beehives instead? Borrow your internet for a bit? I'll have to discuss this with Escher.'
I replied, 'I overheard two pigs—I'll call them Napoleon and Snowball—having a very similar discussion in one of our human fables. They live quite near here, in a place called Lopez Island, out in the San Juans right next to a megafault. Our myths say it used to be its own continental craton. Anyway they were arguing over whether the Super-Organism, the Animal Collective, should take over just what they called the Soviet Pig-Sty, or the whole of what they imagined the World-Island to be.' I didn’t tell him that in that story, Snowball ended up exiled to the next island over.
With that we went our separate days, until at least the next break in the heat and drought of mid-summer.
The moral of the story: Zot!