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Bee-brained

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Re: Bee-brained

#31

Post by nickspacek »

richsinn wrote: post #25
fiblye wrote: post #3

Really interesting article. It's seeming like the more we learn about other life, the more we realize not much separates humans but a couple of thumbs and some decent dexterity. I wonder if someday we'll reach a point where we recognize consciousness in most animals and think it was ridiculous that earlier people didn't see such an obvious fact. Just like how "common knowledge" just a few decades/years ago was that b…

Furthermore, this kind of stuff always makes me wonder if/when other genus will eventually evolve into "intelligent" beings (with "intelligent" being loosely defined). The Homo genus evolved around ~2-3 million years ago; homo sapiens came about ~250K years ago. What's not to say that 2 to 3 million years from now, there'll be some other intelligent species from other genus branches? It always tickles my brain to thi…

I've had the same thought. Unfortunately at the rate we wipe out other species I don't know that they'll get the chance! But when debating conservation efforts for various species it does seem like there is the possibility that on one hand we could be allowing the extinction of a species on the cusp of "intelligence".

Re: Bee-brained

#32

Post by monocasa »

> Yet, for the most part, Descartes did not think very highly of the inner life of nonhuman animals. ‘[T]he reason why animals do not speak as we do is not that they lack the organs but that they have no thoughts,’ Descartes wrote in a letter in 1646.

That's borderline whitewashing his thoughts and actions on the matter. He did stuff like nail his wife's dog to a board and vivisect it to prove that it couldn't "truly" feel pain.

Re: Bee-brained

#33

Post by ajuc »

LitFan wrote: post #15
ajuc wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a stretch to say that religion 'authorizes' us to mistreat/eat animals. "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and every creature that crawls upon the earth." Of course people would do it anyway, especially when they had no other choice (nowadays we could live without exploiting animals, it would even be cheaper and more ecologic - bu…

Unfortunately, those groups, like many others who intend to control people with religion, cherry picked an example that fits their rhetoric. The bible is often contradictory, and in it you can also find these: > 'He that killeth an ox is as if he slew a man' (Isaiah 66.3) > 'For meat destroy not the work of God' (Romans 14.19-21) > 'A righteous man regardeth the life of the beast' (Proverbs 12.10) Christianity doesn'…

Islam is Bible-based as well (to some point). And their halal butchering practices aren't particularly humane by modern standards, even if at some point in the past they were.

Re: Bee-brained

#34

Post by gambler »

Bees are one of the reasons I think the current metrics for "smartness" of AI are misguided and that we are very, very far away from AGI. Bees are capable of learning, planning, communication, prediction and at least some form of abstract reasoning. And it can operate sensibly in contexts very different from its normal environment. All of that with just 960,000 neurons. No artificial neural networks show anything close to this level of flexibility.

Does it really matter whether a bee is better at any of those tasks than "average" or "best" humans?

Clearly, once flexibility is achieved, other capabilities can be improved upon iteratively, because that's exactly what happened in nature. And yet I don't see any researchers looking at how many different tasks their specific AI can accomplish, instead of how well it can accomplish a particular one.

Re: Bee-brained

#35

Post by starbeast »

sdegutis wrote: post #28
maxwell wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: > These bees retrieved their spatial memories entirely out of context, at a time when there was no possibility of foraging and so no immediate need for communication. The function is unclear. They might have ‘just thought’ about these locations spontaneously during the night. Or perhaps the communication is a strategy for consolidating their spatial memory. Scientists have since found that a bee’s m…

Isn't that enough? We can control fire. We can create technology from this one unique capability, which no other creature can. Others have the physical capability to control fire but they cannot actually do it.

>"Intentional Fire-Spreading by “Firehawk” Raptors in Northern Australia"

>"We document Indigenous Ecological Knowledge and non-Indigenous observations of intentional fire-spreading by the fire-foraging raptors Black Kite (Milvus migrans), Whistling Kite (Haliastur sphenurus), and Brown Falcon (Falco berigora) in tropical Australian savannas. Observers report both solo and cooperative attempts, often successful, to spread wildfires intentionally via single-occasion or repeated transport of burning sticks in talons or beaks. This behavior, often represented in sacred ceremonies, is widely known to local people in the Northern Territory, where we carried out ethno-ornithological research from 2011 to 2017; it was also reported to us from Western Australia and Queensland. Though Aboriginal rangers and others who deal with bushfires take into account the risks posed by raptors that cause controlled burns to jump across firebreaks, official skepticism about the reality of avian fire-spreading hampers effective planning for landscape management and restoration. Via ethno-ornithological workshops and controlled field experiments with land managers, our collaborative research aims to situate fire-spreading as an important factor in fire management and fire ecology. In a broader sense, better understanding of avian fire-spreading, both in Australia and, potentially, elsewhere, can contribute to theories about the evolution of tropical savannas and the origins of human fire use."

http://www.bioone.org/doi/10.2993/0278-0771-37.4.700

Re: Bee-brained

#36

Post by TrainedMonkey »

gambler wrote: post #34

Bees are one of the reasons I think the current metrics for "smartness" of AI are misguided and that we are very, very far away from AGI. Bees are capable of learning, planning, communication, prediction and at least some form of abstract reasoning. And it can operate sensibly in contexts very different from its normal environment. All of that with just 960,000 neurons. No artificial neural networks show anything clo…

This is a simplistic view of what is going on. That complexity is not produced by 1e6 neurons alone. Rather it is a combination of a neural net embedded in a biochemical harness. The harness interacts not only with individual bee's systems, but also with environment and other bees (via pheromones, etc.)

I do agree with you that we still have much to learn in neural network design (or more generally distributed algorithms). For example distributed systems are notoriously bad at state machines (or sequencing in general). One of the ways biological systems handle sequencing is via multiple signaling layers with different time constants (e.g. pheromones vs neurons). On the other hand deep learning systems I am familiar with just throw more parameters at the problem, obviously this scales poorly with the sequence length.

Re: Bee-brained

#37

Post by starbeast »

maxwell wrote: post #19
nine_k wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key thing humans got is replacing the genetic evolution by memetic evolution, aka culture, powered by structured communication aka speech. This allowed for organizations above the Dunbar number, and very quick evolution of behaviors without constantly killing and re-spawning physical bodies. Some advanced animals, like wolves, have something resembling a passing of cultural knowledge: they teach their young how t…

> Cetaceans are said to have consciousness not unlike humans'; maybe they have speech and an advanced culture; we don't know. But they lack means of manipulation and live mostly floating above abyss, so they don't have a material culture and technology. You refuted your own argument. Sounds like it's more about the "material culture and technology", which started with control of fire. No living species other than Hom…

Australian raptors do - http://www.bioone.org/doi/10.2993/0278-0771-37.4.700

Re: Bee-brained

#38

Post by JoeAltmaier »

eplanit wrote: post #21
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And our genetic code. And schools and fire departments and lasers.

Exactly. And libraries, moon/Mars/deep space exploration.... It amuses me when there's an article that recognizes a similarity between humans and other species, many jump onto the "see, they're _just_ like us" meme. What I'd be intrigued by is if there is any other species (is there _any_?) that has, century over century, via pure self- and collective-determination, advanced their state of being, achieved new capabil…

Actually we've evolved more in the last 50,000 years than in the 3 million before that. Civilization has definitely left its mark on us.

Re: Bee-brained

#39

Post by ivanhoe »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #23
ivanhoe wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience social insects have much more individuality than most people believe. I kept ants for a while and it was shocking to me how each of them has it's own, unique patterns of behavior. Some like to wander far outside, some prefer to stay close to the entrance. Some are more aggressive, some less. They react to danger and feeding differently, some are easily crazed out, some stay calm. It's hard to see thi…

Is it possible that you can't tell them apart, and that you just assume that all the ants that "craze out" are the ants you previously saw crazing out?

no, some of them are recognizable, have a specific discoloration, or a leg or an antenna missing or something like that's unique about them. My colony was small, a few hundreds ants, and I knew how to tell apart maybe about a dozen of them, enough to notice that not all of them behave identically.
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