The Singularity Institute Blog

The man in the loincloth was back.

He had been coming to their corner of the woods every few nights during the dry season since before any of them had hatched. The termites of the Colony couldn’t help feeling a kinship to the man, for he would build his nightly fire from the crumbled trunks and branches of trees the Colony had previously harvested. Sometimes, he would use the strange tools in his pouches to carve, cook, and eat a portion of whatever he had killed. He had always looked very content.

Today, however, there was apprehension in the Colony. The man had picked up the very log in which most of the Colony was currently laboring. And he did not look content.

Once word had spread, the workers and soldiers gathered at a makeshift podium in a chamber deep within the log to discuss what it all might mean.

“He means to annihilate us!” shouted the first worker to reach the podium.

“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” shouted a respected worker in the crowd. “Does he even know we’re in here?”

“Yes, he must know,” said a young worker nearby. “I walked across his finger as he picked us up, and he twitched.”

The respected worker then shouted, “Then you see? We have nothing to worry about. The man has never given us any reason to think he is not friendly toward us.”

But a worker approached the stand and in a stern voice began to speak. “You are both fools. This is the man we are talking about. His intelligence is of a higher order. We cannot know what he intends.” She was greeted with skeptical stares, but continued unfazed. “He can make fire!” she shouted. “Can you?” she asked, thrusting an antenna at a worker, then at a soldier. “Can you?”

“Maybe not,” replied the soldier, grinning. “But how smart can he be? He’s a million times our size and depends on us for fuel!”

The boisterous laughter that followed cowed the worker away from the podium.

The soldier strutted up. “Look at him! The man is softer and fleshier than our youngest larvae. His jaws are useless in a fight. We could, at any time, pincer him into extinction the way we have pincered every other challenge that has faced our generation. Like those ants from last summer… what were they called?…”

The colony chuckled. Of course they remembered. It had been a rout.

“And it goes without saying,” the soldier continued, “that the rest of the Colony could cut off his wood supply at any time. We are in control.”

There were grumbles of approval. Then, a gravelly voice cut in. “Sergeant, may I?”

“Of course, sir!” replied the soldier. The General herself was requesting the floor. The crowd made way and prepared to listen.

“We’ve been keeping this operation under wraps for some time,” began the General, “but given the present disorder in the log I think it’s best I fill you in.” She had the rapt attention of all. “The biped we call ‘the man’ has been an integral part of our military strategy for some time. By our selection of harvest targets over the past several seasons, we have been carefully directing the man towards the Big Mound.”

There was complete silence at this. The Big Mound was the capital of their mortal enemies: a warmongering colony of rival termites that had been their only real threat for most of their history. Nobody alive in the Colony had ever confronted them, for the Colony had long sought to maintain a safe distance. That the General would actually bring them closer was unthinkable.

“I’m sure you’re wondering why we would do this,” she continued. “The answer is simple. As you know, our ancestral enemies in the Big Mound do not share our peaceful ways. When the man comes into contact with them, he will recognize their evil nature, and with his enormous size do what we could not.”

The general paused for effect.

“He will crush the Big Mound.”

Gasps. Twitters. The news was enormous, and some time passed before a voice raised the obvious question. “Is that what is happening now?”

“We don’t know,” replied the General. “It would be slightly ahead of schedule, but yes, this could be it.”

The terrible, beautiful facts sank in. The man was the weapon. The log was the weapon. They were the weapon.

“What will happen to us?” someone dared to ask.

The General said, “Eighty percent of those on the crushing implement are expected to survive the initial impact. Secondary impacts are not expected, but are possible, with decreasing casualty percentages among survivors on subsequent repetitions. After final impact, remnant forces of the enemy will likely seek sanctuary in the crushing implement, resulting in complete termination of combatant and non-combatants remaining therein.”

Silence.

“We will fight to the last,” said the General. “And we will die as heroes.”

Some of the termites were now sobbing, and embracing those next to them. Others wandered in a daze. Few noticed the young soldier who had just made her way from the outside of the log and over to the General. After a flurry of whispers between them, the General spoke again. “While I must commend you all for your courage, it appears that today is not our day! I have just received word that the man is not proceeding on a trajectory consistent with an assault on the Big Mound. He is instead moving roughly in the direction of his fire pit. I am sorry to have alarmed you all.”

Of course, the fire pit was no less alarming than the Big Mound, but the General was notorious for understatement. Finding themselves back where they started, they looked to their sagest workers for counsel.

A number of these thinkers approached to appease the crowd. One of them expounded on a coming new order, in which the man raised the termites up to his own level of intelligence and understanding. Another compared the man to God, saying that his powers and comprehension made them so similar as to be indistinguishable. To this view, whatever the man had planned for them was for the best.

As if to give credence to this last theory, a new report came in from the exterior. The man had not stopped walking when he reached the fire pit. They were headed somewhere else. Things would work out.

But the next worker to take the stand suppressed these rising hopes. She spoke unflinchingly of doom: of evolution, extinction, and the uncaring nature of the universe. “Sooner or later all termites will come to this — swept away to an end they cannot understand by intelligence beyond their comprehension.”

In that atmosphere of despair, a scholarly old worker considered by many to be wisest among termites took the stand to educate her listeners. “The man, in his greater wisdom and understanding, not only knows all that we know and more,” she began, “but feels more deeply as well. He is not without compassion, or gratitude. He knows that he owes his ability to hunt in these woods to our labors. Without us, he and his kin would have starved to death long ago.”

She waited, as if for applause that did not come. Someone coughed. She continued her lecture. “Let me also point out that our termite ancestry vastly predates that of the man, and that our kind helped shape the environment in which he evolved. In a real sense, he is our cousin, if not our child. I am sure he will not only preserve us, but honor us.”

More awkward silence.

“The man will come and go,” she concluded, “but termites are forever!”

That got the reaction she seemed to be looking for, and she stepped down to buzzing applause.

—

For the few able to suppress the nausea of clinging to the outside of the log, the sights were strange and powerful. None who remained would ever pull themselves away to report back inside, but here is what they saw:

The man carried them to the edge of the forest, and beyond. They had not known there was an edge, but here it was, sudden and frightening. Fallen trees and dead shrubs completely covered the earth in a wide swath, overlapping each other in awkward embraces. The man slowly picked his way through the debris.

After a short time, they arrived at another edge, beyond which uniform carpets of golden stalks and grasses extended as far as they could see. The sky above was broken by plumes of smoke they remembered from the campfires made by the man in more familiar times.

Here, at this boundary between a chaos they vaguely recognized and an order they did not, the man put down the log. They came to rest on a pile of twigs and branches, between other logs like their own that fanned out into the cut vegetation.

Another, like the man, was now standing over them. Rounder than the man, the learned among the workers realized this must be woman. One even deduced, correctly, that she must be with child. She held a firebrand.

The woman embraced the man for a moment with her free arm, while the man looked down at the ground. She handed him the firebrand.

The man turned his gaze back to the woods for a long moment, staring. He then looked at the burning piece of wood in his hand.

Slumping down to one knee, then two, the man gently placed the firebrand among the twigs beneath the log.

A worker whispered what she thought she had seen in the man’s face.

“He weeps for us.”
—
Author’s Note: I did not write this piece to imply that greater intelligence must spell our own doom. I was merely hoping to illustrate that humanity has a poor track record when it comes to thinking rationally about greater intelligence.

The worst assumption of these termites wasn’t that they could somehow control the man, or that the man was their friend. It was the assumption that the man would think about termites in any of the ways that they themselves did. Indeed, the man clearly had a lot on his mind, but probably never thought about termites at all.

This is perhaps the greatest challenge in creating genuine artificial intelligence: being able to guarantee anything about the priorities of a mind that may become more intelligent than ourselves. It is a problem SIAI is working to solve.

We need to let those writing our future know who they are.