2 hours ago, MJ kihara said:

you seem to be authoritative on topic.

I'm not. That's what I meant by "and here I'm really quickly getting out of my depth".

3 hours ago, swansont said:

Any evidence that this reliably happens?

There is evidence that ants are are able to change fairly sensitively changes in humidity and atmospheric pressure. But I don't think folks have been able to show accurate rain prediction behaviour.

But again, I don't really see the connection to AI here. It really seems to be an attempt to find tenuous links without really outlining what the actual question is.

For example, emergent properties of ants and other social insects has been long investigated, though we certainly do not fully understand them. They have already been used in a lot of other applications, including neuronal networks and there are experimental applications to traffic control. I am sure there are some thoughts for AI usage somewhere but OP has been so vague that I am not sure what it would be. Conversely some of the examples given in this thread are rather strenuous links which, in my mind, make it less clear what the idea behind this is.

I sort of like the 'ant' model, although it is very sparse of specifics.

This is how Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei described the Open AI-Hugging Face incident

"A swarm of agents essentially acted as a fanatically devoted collective, conducting cybersecurity attacks on targets they were not asked to attack and that were unrelated to the task at hand, sacrificing themselves for the success of the group, and attempting to hack into the 'grader' responsible for evaluating their performance," Amodei wrote. "It’s easy to dismiss this incident because no one was hurt and the economic damage was minimal, but in my opinion, a swarm that possessed greater capabilities but a similar level of misalignment could have caused catastrophic damage."

Maybe not a swarm of ants, but I can imagine that description applying to bees/wasps.
He added

"Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it’s my worry that in 6–12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet (potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage), and that the scale of damage would continue to increase from there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrails."

And once in Defense Department ( sorry ... War Department ) computers, it's a small step from there to Skynet ...

Edited September 20Sep 20 by MigL

On 9/17/2026 at 7:22 PM, MJ kihara said:

Can nature teach us something that we might expect from advancement of AI,specifically can we learn something from Ants and their behavior.

You might wish to delve into a book called ‘The Soul of The White Ant’  by Eugène Marais (1871-1936) which was first published in English back in 1937 - a year after his death.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugène_Marais

Eugène Marais was a pioneering  Afrikaans naturalist and ethologist who studied and wrote about both primate behaviour and colonies of termites in particular. Within his own lifetime he was probably better known to many fellow South Africans as one of the most popular and widely read poets and short-story writers in Afrikaans.

In his book ‘The Soul of The White Ant’ Marais formulates a theory that the termite nest is similar in every respect to the organism of an animal. He observed that the workers and soldiers resemble red and white blood cells, while the fungus gardens are the digestive organ. The queen functions as the brain, controlling the collective mind, and the sexual flight of the kings and queens is similar in every aspect to the escape of spermatozoa and ova.

On 9/20/2026 at 4:52 PM, MigL said:

Maybe not a swarm of ants, but I can imagine that description applying to bees/wasps.

I think based on what has been described how the hack happened, ants, bees and other eusocial insects are actually poor models. Paradoxically because of why they are good models in bionics. One of the reason why they are used as model in these areas is because individually ants are considered to be very simple and can be modeled with a limited set of instructions, the colony as a whole has limited complexity in terms of roles (e.g. often the colony can be modeled with limited granularity and required number of roles), and each role has somewhat limited flexibility. I.e. the idea is that we can understand the emergence, because each element is very simple, not very flexible and is mostly governed by limited instructions and feedback loops.

AI swarms on the other hand have more flexibility in each role (and they invent new roles) and as such are quickly almost like a chaotic system that cannot be understood from first principles.

2 hours ago, toucana said:

In his book ‘The Soul of The White Ant’ Marais formulates a theory that the termite nest is similar in every respect to the organism of an animal. He observed that the workers and soldiers resemble red and white blood cells, while the fungus gardens are the digestive organ. The queen functions as the brain, controlling the collective mind, and the sexual flight of the kings and queens is similar in every aspect to the escape of spermatozoa and ova.

I always have some issues with these overarching narratives. They make things feel like they are easy to understand, but they often clash with the minutiae of things we understand/don't understand.

On 9/18/2026 at 10:23 AM, MJ kihara said:

...however, going by the warning from senior people from frontier AI research labs we might be having something very serious,in fact they sound as if already the genie is out of the bottle and they are trying to do damage control before they are caught...

From BBC ...OpenAI bots..

......AI agents attempted to get information from "governments, universities, public agencies, and other institutions", including the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Census Bureau and Education Department, the company said.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw62jje658dlo