That's insanely impressive and almost scary level of adaptation/smart behaviour from the ants.
Edit: it feels more like something you'd read from Adrian Czajkowski/Tchaikovsky rather than reality.
Edit: it feels more like something you'd read from Adrian Czajkowski/Tchaikovsky rather than reality.
Ants farm aphids. They don't just find aphids and collect their "honeydew" excretions. They actually bring the aphids to the plants and then tend to them.
Ants harvest the sunflower seeds from my sunflowers. Not just some of the seeds. If I leave the flowers even one day past the time to harvest those seeds, the ants get every single seed. They do it by having some ants up on the flower popping out the seeds, and more ants down below collecting them off the ground. That's some incredible coordination. And these are tiny ants, not some big powerful ants. It's mind boggling to think any creature is able to pull it off. I'm honestly surprised they don't have megalithic structures built of huge stones. Though their underground colonies are megalithic in scale compared to the ants.
Maybe instead of ancient aliens we should look into ants as the actual builders of the pyramids.
https://www.animalcognition.org/2015/04/15/list-of-animals-t...
Since an LLM has no sense of self or instances, what does it mean for it to talk to itself?
In a way, doesn't it already "talk to itself" when generating sentences, e.g., its output token gets added to the input tokens successively?
While I'd be surprised to learn they have anything a normal person would call a sense of self, it would only be mild surprise and even then mainly because it means we finally have a testable definition. (Amongst other things, I don't buy that the mirror test is a good test, but rather I think it's an OK first attempt at a test).
We're really bad at this.
> In a way, doesn't it already "talk to itself" when generating sentences, e.g., its output token gets added to the input tokens successively?
I'm not sure if that counts as talking to itself or not; I think that I tend to form complete ideas first and then turn them into words which I may edit afterwards, but is that editing process "talking to myself"?
And this might well be one kind of "sense of self". Possibly.
If this is the basis of a mirror test, most AI recognition attempts have pretty high failure rates, so I'd say they currently fail. But if we presented a similar test to a human, "did you write this?" it seems to fall short of a mirror test because it can be falsified by an otherwise unintelligent algorithm which remembers its previous output.
As an observer is needed to assess the LLM, perhaps the easiest test is copy-paste between two instances and then ask chatGPT, or whichever LLM, "who were you talking to?".
I think an experiment would be to feed back whatever a LLM says to that same LLM, and see whether they’ll, at some time, say “why are you doing that to me?”
Not only do they farm aphids, they also farm fungus. Leafcutter ants bring the leaves to their fungus farm. Then they eat the fungus.
So ants farm both livestock and crops.
They also form super colonies.
My bias (for essentially aesthetic reasons) is to assume that each ant is basically pretty dumb, and the cool complex behaviors happen as an emergent property of how they respond to the stimuli they recieve (especially all the pheromone messages they get from other ants).
Can't ants be swapped out as humans here?
Ants have a similar hivemind.
It was pretty awesome.
Ants: use antibiotics to treat wounds
Human: I'm not using that! It has microchips from Bill Gates in it!
Human: To keep the animals I am factory farming relatively healthy, I will regularly douse them in antibiotics!
Later: Wait why are these bacteria resistant to my antibiotics??
When ants from different colonies meet (with different genetics lineages) they fight wars of total annihilation. Ant colonies do not cooperate.
Probably the most common example is that colonies which have been around for a while and are stable often adopt new queens that turn up from outside. Then multiple queens are producing workers and you get a colony made of many distinct "families".
There are even examples of nests consisting of ants from different species. Quoting from the article I referenced earlier
> Ants engaged in parabiotic associations cooperate in a variety of ways including shared nest defense, trophallaxis, and communal use of trail pheromones. For example, “ant gardens” in the Neotropics (Davidson, 1988; Orivel et al., 1997) and in Asian rainforests (Kaufmann and Maschwitz, 2006; Menzel and Bluthgen, 2010) are often co-inhabited by species from the genera Crematogaster and Camponotus (along with a number of other genera) .... While brood chambers are kept separate, the rest of the colonies mix freely within the joint nest. In addition to sharing foraging trails to plant-based resources (Menzel et al., 2010), both species will defend the nest although larger Camponotus tend to exhibit the majority of the defensive behaviors (Menzel and Bluthgen, 2010).
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2021.73675...
I guess there are a couple of movies about that. :)
"Yes, the All-Wise Creator summarizes the principles of the Clear Book in most beautiful form and abbreviated fashion and with a particular pleasure and through a special need, and includes them in beings. If everything acts thus with a particular pleasure out of a particular need, it unknowingly conforms to the principles of the Clear Book." Quran's Light
You have to prove a statement like that. All evidence points to them being intelligent and you are just pushing a human oriented version of the world that minimizes the intelligent animals and insects that challenge your world view.
But ants are pretty damn close to human levels of scary, IMO. Look up the acid spitting crazy ants and tell me that's not a little bit scary.
Assuming that a majority of the road traffic deaths are attributable to humans then humans seem to very easily beat mosquitos/malaria at killing other humans.
and also fungus
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-ants-becam...
https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/why-leafcutter-ants-...
I used to feed ants to watch them, and even witnessed some and ant wars in my garden as a child. I would have spent days watching them harvest sunflower seeds!
Each ant could be very dumb while the system of ants as a whole are quite "smart" (I.e. exhibit complex and interesting behaviours).
Certainly individual ants learn stuff
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.190778
But adaptions also happen by evolution and (very speculatively) might also happen at the colony level by it changing its responses somehow. E.g. I could imagine an ant colony suddenly faced with many attackers adapting by breeding more soldiers.
edit - didn't see eigenket's comment basically saying the same thing
I, for one, welcome our ant overlords.
I fully agree while thinking the same thing about our immune system behavior. The insanely scary impressive thing is that this level of adaptation is the rule not the anomaly in biological systems.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9881685/#:~:tex....
https://www.journalofscience.net/showpdf/MjY4a2FsYWkxNDc4NTI...