"your cellphone is smarter" -- I'd like to disagree without being disagreeable! I'd say ants are at least an order of magnitude smarter than a cell phone. Ants are less intelligible to humans maybe, as their intelligence is not of service to us, but they are most definitely more useful to us than phones as well.

How do you know? I know a lot about brains, I like brains and I am not certain that I can quantify the degree of suffering likely to be felt by an ant.

The Ant has possibly the largest brain/body mass ratio in the entire animal kingdom. Which is possibly why there are 10 million more ants per human on the planet. That's a smart brain in my book.

Having said that I am all for mass ant sacrifice to figure out the magic.

I don't disagree but it always makes me wonder if aliens are out there tearing a few of us limb from limb and saying... they're only humans.

Sure, but cellphones don't actually have any level of intelligence and could never solve a task it wasn't programmed to do.