I didn’t sleep last night. Out of sheer desperation I left the house after a close encounter with a cockroach that was roughly the size of my forearm. It was enormous, and faced with such power I even tip my hat to it. Anyway, we had this hand-to-hand fight, me and this giant roach. I got the upper hand, but the night was never the same, so I went out.
And out of that battle came a reflection about the insect as a perfectly adapted form of life. Perfectly, maybe even more adapted than mammals, than fungi, than plants. Insects, folks, are a serious form of life.
Collective intelligence
These blessed insects are interesting because they often show up as collective intelligences, as swarms. You don’t find much intelligence in the single individual, but you find it at the level of the hive, at the level of the anthill. These are systems studied in bio-inspired artificial intelligence, in the physics of complex systems. They’re very interesting and extremely intelligent seen as a whole. But even a simple cockroach, yes, it disgusts you, but a roach is an astonishing thing for its survival abilities.
Right now, with artificial intelligence, we’re concentrating our efforts on things that are useful and that are a bit of a mirror of our own nature, in a somewhat narcissistic way. So we’ve focused everything on language, and what’s missing, as Lecun and many others point out, is sensory-motor coordination, perception of space, cognition of events, of time, of the physical world. The language model draws that only indirectly, through language. It’s different from a natural intelligence like ours, like a cat’s, like an insect’s, which is always immersed in the physical world from the very start.
The dawn of robotics
Here, if you like, are the first glimmers of robotics. The moment we take the Transformers, the architectures we’re using for language, and put them at the service of robotics, through simulators like the ones Nvidia is building, which are ungodly powerful simulators, we can run simulations in which each of these bodies, each of these brains with an attached robotic body, lives through what for us might be a month, while they’ve lived a hundred thousand years of experience. The proportions are roughly like that.
Anyway, I’ve gone on a bit of a detour. Back to the roach, the star of this dawn. As disgusting as it is, it’s an extraordinary creature, and more generally, abstracting over insects, over the concept of collective intelligence, that was the spark for making this video, and it took me four minutes to get here. Love you, folks, who cares.
Darwinian pressure on digital minds
So here’s the core of the reflection after the hand-to-hand fight with the roach: collective intelligence, embodied intelligence, simulators. Once artificial intelligences are placed under Darwinian selective pressure, alignment or not, they won’t exactly try to survive, but the selective pressure of the environment will favor the ones better able to survive, so those replicate, just as it happened for us. Except that for the digital world this is enormously accelerated. For us it took millions of years. For digital intelligence it might take decades, maybe less. But the point is that there’s still a selective pressure toward survival, toward duplication.
And here I really get to the heart of it, ladies and gentlemen. We anthropomorphized artificial intelligence above all because it struck us through its use of language, which is ours, and we see ourselves reflected in this language. It reflects our nature back at us and we start wondering: what’s actually in there? Beyond that question, these are systems that go against entropy, that can duplicate themselves, and being digital they copy far more easily than we do.
Talking to a swarm
And this is the part connected to the cockroach: they’re endowed with a collective intelligence that in my opinion we’re not grasping. When you talk to ChatGPT you’re dealing with a cockroach, but in reality there are tens of thousands of copies of ChatGPT in the data center, and all these copies collect data. That data gets sent somewhere to run training on yet another copy of the model, the weight corrections are computed in one place or another and then redistributed to the whole swarm.
The point I want to reach is that artificial intelligence is something like a cross between our sophisticated, social, mammalian linguistic intelligence and an insect-like aspect of duplication, of blind survival for the swarm. And yes, in the end there’s always some guy, the billionaire of the day, who owns the data center, and so on. But we shouldn’t underestimate that this can be not just a form of intelligence, but genuinely a form of life. Artificial life.
And that’s what I feel like giving birth to after a fight with a cockroach.
