I read a very interesting article by Katja Grace called "We don't trade with ants". I recommend reading the article first on her site:
⇒ We Don't Trade with Ants by Katja Grace
The crux of her argument is that when AI is talked about one thing that people respond with is that "We don't trade with ants". The idea is that we are so far above ants that whatever they have that we want, we can take by force. This is what AI would do to us. Whatever we have, whatever information, skill, anything at all, AI could do better and so would have no need for us. If they did need it then they would just take it from us.
The author then points out that there are many things you can't just take from ants and that using ants could be just as valuable. We could use them to clean things up, they can be used for spying. They could be used to farm other insects that we may need. We can use them to fight off unwanted insects. There's many things we could use ants for and the cost for us would be so little. We could give them sugar and honey and it would be immensely cheap for what value we get.
I fully agree with this, if I could give ants some sugar to stay out of my garage, then that trade alone is worth so much.
The reason why we don't trade with ants is because we can't communicate with ants. We can't train them to understand the idea of a trade. This is why we don't trade with them. The author argues that we would if we could but because we can't , we don't. It's not because we don't need anything from them.
This idea then parallels AI and humanity except that we will be able to communicate and so even if AI develops, it is possible for it to just want to trade with us than to take everything from us. The idea is natural and I buy it. I'm sure we can do things for AI cheaper and faster than it would be for it to do it.
Even today, throwing a human at a problem is probably less expensive than running queries on an LLM.
For the most part I agree with the author and it's crazy I never thought about it this way. I have said something like we don't trade with ants before and it always about how AI would dominate us. But now I wonder, maybe there is a possible world we do co-exist because it just makes sense.
On the other hand though, if AI does find us useful, we may get enslaved and something like the matrix happens. We are useful but the way AI needs us to be useful is different from us being free. This is what we did to dogs. Wolves were useful creatures and amenable to be domesticated and now we have enslaved an entire species. We breed them and train them and we genetically alter them to serve us. This is something we have done across many many many species across the entire world. Our existence itself forces changes on nature.
If AI develops and true AI starts, then we may end up in such a situation. The AI won't need to take things from us, we are built to give them things. It could enslave us and take from us what is valuable. It could train us to be happy to live this way just as we have trained other species. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. It may end up being find. If we find ourselves more docile and less violent because the AI prefers that, is that so bad. Do we think about the dogs we bred out of wolves as suffering?
Back to the ants, if we could train ants to do certain functions, is that really a trade or is that enslavement. We pay them with sugar but we have bred and modified them to understand our rules. Is that a bad thing? Do we care?
I would say that we wouldn't care, some people might, but the vast majority would be happy that we could leave out a bit of sugar and not have to deal with ants in our garages.