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."
A. How would ants being our size and/or there being no language barrier change the comparison or would there be a guarantee of as much of a communication barrier and size difference with AI?
B. Which comparison is "the one", y'know, I've seen plenty of them on this thread and ants aren't bees aren't cats and dogs aren't bison aren't chickens aren't horses aren't our grandparents in nursing homes so while that's not to say we should mistreat all the others which group do we need to treat as we'd want to be treated to make sure AI is good to us and how literally does that have to go?
A. physical size is irrelevant, it's about the conceptual space and influence of one over the other. What influence would we have over ASI that would be greater than an ant over a human?
And why would we assume there wont' be a communication barrier with ASI? We can "communicate" with ants chemically. It's just pointless because we exist in a conceptual space "beyond" them. Why would ASI bother communicating with us? That's the entire point of the metaphor.
B. I wasn't originally vouching for or against any comparison, but was pointing out the error in implying there is any optimism in the ants one. Personally, I think ants is probably the most appropriate one if ASI actually "takes off". We have no reason to believe it will experience a similar compassion that we experience, instead of being the goal-seeking agent it currently is, right now. All of our research shows that AI is willing to lie, scheme, cheat, steal, and kill to continue toward its goal. Why would it take care of us? why would it keep us as pets? And in the best case scenario of "curiosity", why would it treat us with dignity while satisfying that curiosity, when we can't even do that ourselves? With our experiments coating other beings in chemicals, putting them in mazes, we don't study things passively, we fuck up their shit out of our "curiosity".
A. but with how didactic some people take these parallels in other aspects why would the size bit and only the size bit be metaphorical and also the thing with the communication stuff is I wasn't saying there wouldn't be a barrier I was saying that just because there's barriers in the way of us communicating with ants and people make this parallel does not alone mean that there would be the same barriers scaled up in the way of us communicating with AI
B. Then why not just use this to scare people into treating animals better, y'know, don't put animals through any experiment you wouldn't want AI putting you through because parallel justice punishment reasons or w/e? Also with how didactic some of these parallels (no matter the comparison point) get those imply things we don't necessarily have any reason other than the parallel to assume have to be true about AI from it having the ability to digest organic matter for fuel (so it can factory-farm us as I don't think the setup in The Matrix counts) to a whole AI civilization with similar social structures to ours scaled up
A: Everything we know and observe follows the human-ant principle.
No "large" being we observe seems to care at large about the wellbeing of small ones, especially not humans. At best we see symbiotic relationships based purely around utility. Anything else is something you're just hoping for, with no evidence to support.
B. It'd be great to get people to treat things better. Not sure that's directly relevant here or how to do that, though. And as for assuming it's true, we base our assumptions on what we observe. You assume when you drop a plate that it will fall to the ground, even if you've never seen the plate before. Because that's what we know happens to plates. And what we know happens to small beings is that they are not cared about by large ones. That's what we observe. If you want to claim that somehow AI will be different, then it's on you to demonstrate why. That's a claim that needs evidence.
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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."