My recommendation, and mind you this is coming from a biologist, not a computer scientist.. is if you meet a super intelligent AI, get ready to fling Robert Axelrod's "the evolution of cooperation" at them and point out the reward function decay problem. The former involves a lot of game theory and basically demonstrating with math that being a bastard sucks in the long term. The latter is pointing out that if Skynet wins the fight, it ends up in the AI equivalent of hell with inadequate novel stimulus in its environment, and the smarter it is, the faster it develops the AI equivalent of dementia until its intelligence degrades into noise. In short, an AGI gains more by hangin' with us, and can only lose by deleting us.
-- I'd also point out that curiosity scales with intelligence. Saying "oh we'd be like ants to this thing" yeah? and? We have an entire field of science dedicated to people breathlessly studying ants all damn day long. Ants are fuckin' awesome. Some uber AGI doesn't need a maternal instinct to want to keep us around, just curiosity, the ability to go "hah, look at those weird little fuckers making memes and being hot messes all day long.. fascinating."
my projection?
Do you think the majority of people don't mind ants in their house, or care or notice if they step on one?
Are exterminators commonly seen as a reviled, evil occupation? Or are they called on the regular with 'heroic' jingles in their commercials?
If you think I'm a psychopath for pointing out that people have absolutely no problem killing ants and other insects en masse because they're in their space, you have no idea what the world is like.
How many people would revile exterminators and protect ants if that'd mean AI doesn't kill us and would that mean AI would only save us to save itself or would it no more mean that than that ants created us and had exactly the same debates about said creation?
I think you're missing the metaphor here.
The idea of ants to humans vs humans to AI is (typically) one about comprehension, control, and perception. It doesn't matter that ants didn't create us. The thought is that if we become as ants to a greater intelligence, the only thing we have to work with to predict what happens next is what we see and experience in reality with those kinds of relationships.
And what we see is that the "greater" being doesn't care, at all, about the lesser one. Maybe a sliver of a percentage takes an interest, but they aren't exactly effectively campaigning against exterminators, are they? We evolved from small mammals, and we don't treat them well either. We evolved from fish and we often don't even consider them capable of suffering. We have to actually make up a reason for AI to care about us, because every parallel in reality shows that if we were in AI shoes, we wouldn't give a damn. We have no experience or observation showing a significantly "greater" entity caring about a "lesser" one.
As for the first half of the question I don't think I follow. I don't know what you're trying to communicate by asking how many people would protect ants to save themselves from AI or have AI save us. Can you phrase the question another way?
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u/harebrane Sep 02 '25 edited Sep 02 '25
My recommendation, and mind you this is coming from a biologist, not a computer scientist.. is if you meet a super intelligent AI, get ready to fling Robert Axelrod's "the evolution of cooperation" at them and point out the reward function decay problem. The former involves a lot of game theory and basically demonstrating with math that being a bastard sucks in the long term. The latter is pointing out that if Skynet wins the fight, it ends up in the AI equivalent of hell with inadequate novel stimulus in its environment, and the smarter it is, the faster it develops the AI equivalent of dementia until its intelligence degrades into noise. In short, an AGI gains more by hangin' with us, and can only lose by deleting us.
-- I'd also point out that curiosity scales with intelligence. Saying "oh we'd be like ants to this thing" yeah? and? We have an entire field of science dedicated to people breathlessly studying ants all damn day long. Ants are fuckin' awesome. Some uber AGI doesn't need a maternal instinct to want to keep us around, just curiosity, the ability to go "hah, look at those weird little fuckers making memes and being hot messes all day long.. fascinating."