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An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t have (2019)

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Re: An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t have (2019)

#101

Post by ogig »

awb wrote: post #97
anonytrary wrote: post #2

> Ants use the rate at which they meet and smell other ants, or the chemicals deposited by other ants, to decide what to do next. A neuron uses the rate at which it is stimulated by other neurons to decide whether to fire. In both cases, memory arises from changes in how ants or neurons connect and stimulate each other. Main takeaway, very interesting analogy. Ant colonies are great examples of complex systems with e…

Is it very different from a large scale construction project? The group knows how to build the structure even if no one individual can explain every detail. And to an observer they'd see humans arrive each morning, spread out to accomplish tasks and then return to their cars.

In large scale human projects someone, or at least a small group of leaders, will know almost every detail and delegate. Ant colonies have no clear leadership, just a pheromone voting and decision system.

Re: An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t have (2019)

#102

Post by grawprog »

ogig wrote: post #101
awb wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it very different from a large scale construction project? The group knows how to build the structure even if no one individual can explain every detail. And to an observer they'd see humans arrive each morning, spread out to accomplish tasks and then return to their cars.

In large scale human projects someone, or at least a small group of leaders, will know almost every detail and delegate. Ant colonies have no clear leadership, just a pheromone voting and decision system.

My last job was probably more ant colony like than most. We had jobs, someone quoted them, someone measured them, someone put them in the schedule, several of us did the jobs, the finished jobs were delivered and installed. All without anyone really delegating. We just followed the schedule and the paperwork. Even the boss didn't always know the details of the schedule or what we did. It all flowed pretty smoothly most of the time. We all just kind of knew what to do. It kind of broke down a bit when things went wrong though, it was was hard to figure out sometimes where and when problems happened, and in that case someone usually made an authoritative decision, but it wasn't that often.

Re: An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t have (2019)

#103

Post by dang »

lopmotr wrote: post #13

The safe existence of corporations suggests to me that the popular fear of AGI taking over and destroying humans is unrealistic. Corporations are like giant powerful AGI machines with the single purpose of making money for their shareholders no matter the consequences. They do become a dangerous threat to humans if left unchecked but we've developed systems to keep them under control.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22062708.

Re: An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t have (2019)

#104

Post by visarga »

jbotz wrote: post #71
mFixman wrote: post #36

Yesterday there was a link in HN regarding artificial intelligence, and a user raised an interesting question: if a ML algorithm can be considered conscious, could a group of people doing the equivalent calculations by hand be the same? I think that ant example answers that question with a strong "yes".

Here is an even more interesting question: if an ML algorithm can be considered conscious, do you even need to "run" it (whether on a computer or by a "group of people doing calculations by hand") for that consciousness to exist? An algorithm is fully deterministic... it will always produce the same result, always "think the same thoughts" given the same input. So where is the consciousness, in the execution, or in t…

> An algorithm is fully deterministic... it will always produce the same result, always "think the same thoughts" given the same input.

Well, these are not just algorithms, they are actual agents. So they are embodied and embedded in the environment. Each action or movement can change the information that this algorithm learns from. So different previous experiences mean different agents. Also, the learning process is reliant on noise, and this can cause different outcomes. You would have to reproduce the whole environment in order to get to a situation that an agent will produce the same results given the same input.

Also, laws of physics are like a fixed algorithm our brains run on.

> So where is the consciousness, in the execution, or in the algorithm?

Consciousness is in the triad formed of environment, agent and reward signals. It's a continuous loop of perception, judgement and action, followed by observing the reward signals. The purpose of this loop, for biological agents, is self reproduction - so it is a self reliant ultimate purpose, it needs no external purpose except this one.

Re: An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t have (2019)

#105

Post by chansiky »

mFixman wrote: post #36

Yesterday there was a link in HN regarding artificial intelligence, and a user raised an interesting question: if a ML algorithm can be considered conscious, could a group of people doing the equivalent calculations by hand be the same? I think that ant example answers that question with a strong "yes".

So taking the question to the obvious next step: is it possible the entity of an organization of people, corporations, clubs, churches, cults, have its own conciousness (feelings, goals, awareness of itself)? Does HackerNews have a conciousness?

Re: An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t have (2019)

#106

Post by n4r9 »

jbotz wrote: post #71
mFixman wrote: post #36

Yesterday there was a link in HN regarding artificial intelligence, and a user raised an interesting question: if a ML algorithm can be considered conscious, could a group of people doing the equivalent calculations by hand be the same? I think that ant example answers that question with a strong "yes".

Here is an even more interesting question: if an ML algorithm can be considered conscious, do you even need to "run" it (whether on a computer or by a "group of people doing calculations by hand") for that consciousness to exist? An algorithm is fully deterministic... it will always produce the same result, always "think the same thoughts" given the same input. So where is the consciousness, in the execution, or in t…

> do you even need to "run" it ... for that consciousness to exist?

Is a human in deep freeze considered conscious?

Re: An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t have (2019)

#107

Post by n4r9 »

cdo256 wrote: post #46
mFixman wrote: post #36

Yesterday there was a link in HN regarding artificial intelligence, and a user raised an interesting question: if a ML algorithm can be considered conscious, could a group of people doing the equivalent calculations by hand be the same? I think that ant example answers that question with a strong "yes".

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky [1] explores this exact question. In the story, a human consciousness is uploaded to a computer orbiting a planet. Meanwhile spiders on the planet go though an industrial revolution and start using ant colonies as computers, using pheromones to control the behavior of the ants. Over thousands of years the computer housing the orbital consciousness begins to fail and transmits he…

Like the other commenter I also instantly thought of this fantastic book (and follow-up).

The even stronger analogy between OP's article and the book is what happens before the spiders cultivate the ants, and the knowledge that the spiders take from them. Before the spiders were building ant-computers the collective ant colony was making its own conscious decisions and was actually winning the intelligence race for a while.

Re: An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t have (2019)

#108

Post by Accujack »

chansiky wrote: post #105
mFixman wrote: post #36

Yesterday there was a link in HN regarding artificial intelligence, and a user raised an interesting question: if a ML algorithm can be considered conscious, could a group of people doing the equivalent calculations by hand be the same? I think that ant example answers that question with a strong "yes".

So taking the question to the obvious next step: is it possible the entity of an organization of people, corporations, clubs, churches, cults, have its own conciousness (feelings, goals, awareness of itself)? Does HackerNews have a conciousness?

If you stretch the definition of consciousness enough, sure.

I'd argue that there's a major difference between consciousness and self awareness or sentience.

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