I’ve been considering lots recently a couple of species of carpenter ant that lives within the mountains round Jerusalem. These tiny bugs may simply maintain the important thing to one in every of AI’s largest challenges: alignment.
The ants in query are referred to as Camponotus sanctus, they usually do one thing exceptional that places our most subtle AI programs to disgrace. When these ant colonies relocate, they face complicated selections: safety from predators, enough nest measurement, proximity to meals, and accessibility for the colony. The stakes are excessive—a poor selection may doom 1000’s.
However right here’s what’s fascinating: Quite than counting on a single “superintelligent” chief or centralized command construction, the colony employs a democratic course of the place every ant within the search get together makes its personal choice primarily based on potential websites it has evaluated. Particular person ants assess totally different areas independently, and thru their collective interactions, the colony persistently arrives at optimum options—even when no particular person ant possesses full details about all obtainable choices.
Researchers name this “majority concession”: When confronted with conflicting preferences, the bulk generally abandons its favored choice to protect colony unity, becoming a member of the minority reasonably than risking a cut up. This subtle collective habits emerges with none central coordinator, representing a type of distributed intelligence that would revolutionize how we strategy AI alignment.
Why Ought to We Care About Ant Democracy When We’re Constructing AI Programs?
The reply lies within the limitations of our present strategy to AI alignment: reinforcement studying from human suggestions, or RLHF.
RLHF has been transformative. It’s what makes ChatGPT useful as a substitute of dangerous, what retains Claude from going off the rails, and what permits these programs to know human preferences in ways in which appeared unimaginable just some years in the past. However as we transfer towards extra autonomous AI programs—what we name “agentic AI”—RLHF reveals elementary constraints.
The fee drawback: Human choice knowledge in RLHF is dear and extremely subjective. Getting high quality human suggestions is time-consuming, and the price of human annotation could be many occasions increased than utilizing AI suggestions.
The scalability drawback: RLHF scales much less effectively than pretraining, with diminishing returns from further computational sources. It’s like attempting to show a toddler each attainable state of affairs they could encounter as a substitute of giving them rules to cause from.
The “whose values?” drawback: Human values and preferences aren’t solely numerous but in addition mutable, altering at totally different charges throughout time and cultures. Whose suggestions ought to the AI optimize for? A centralized strategy inevitably introduces bias and loses vital nuances.
When Particular person Intelligence Fails
The issues with individual-agent approaches aren’t simply theoretical. We’ve seen them play out in real-world AI failures that ought to give us pause.
Take into account Microsoft’s Tay chatbot in 2016. Designed to be taught from interactions, Tay was rapidly derailed by coordinated assaults feeding it offensive content material. Missing collective knowledge, Tay had no context or peer perspective to attract upon. Inside 24 hours, this subtle AI system was posting inflammatory content material, forcing Microsoft to close it down.
Related patterns seem throughout industries. Tesla’s Autopilot system, regardless of subtle algorithms, has been concerned in accidents the place the system misidentified obstacles. IBM’s Watson for Oncology started recommending unsafe therapies as a result of it operated as a person intelligence, missing the collective knowledge and peer overview that human medical communities depend upon.
These aren’t simply implementation issues—they’re signs of a elementary limitation in how we take into consideration AI alignment.
The Double-Edged Sword of Human Swarms
Swarm intelligence in people—generally referred to as “human swarms” or “hive minds”—has proven promise in sure contexts. When teams of persons are linked in actual time and interactively converge on selections, they’ll outperform people and even commonplace statistical aggregates on duties like medical prognosis, forecasting, and problem-solving. That is very true when the group is numerous, members are actively engaged, and suggestions is speedy and interactive.
Nonetheless, human swarms aren’t proof against failure—particularly within the ethical area. Historical past demonstrates that collective intelligence can devolve into collective folly by witch hunts, mob mentality, and mass hysteria. Teams can amplify concern, prejudice, and irrationality whereas suppressing dissenting voices.
Analysis means that whereas collective intelligence can result in optimized selections, it may possibly additionally enlarge biases and errors, notably when social pressures suppress minority opinions or emotional contagion overrides rational deliberation. In ethical reasoning, human swarms can attain increased phases of growth by deliberation and numerous views, however with out correct safeguards, the identical mechanisms can produce groupthink and ethical regression.
The Ant Colony Different
Whereas particular person AI brokers wrestle with these challenges, the carpenter ants of Jerusalem have been perfecting collective choice making for tens of millions of years. Their strategy suggests a radically totally different path ahead.
Analysis suggests particular person ants might select incorrectly 43% of the time, but the colony achieves as much as 95% accuracy by collective choice making. This dramatic enchancment emerges from the swarm’s skill to combination numerous info sources and cancel out particular person biases and errors.
The mechanism is elegant in its simplicity. Every ant follows fundamental guidelines about high quality evaluation and communication, however the important thing lies of their interactions. When ants consider potential nest websites, they’re not simply making particular person judgments—they’re taking part in a distributed computation that considers a number of views concurrently.
However the analogy has limits. Ant colonies aren’t susceptible to mass hysteria or ethical panics; their “swarm intelligence” developed to optimize survival, not ethics. Human swarms, against this, are deeply formed by tradition, emotion, and historical past—making our collective intelligence each a supply of knowledge and a possible engine of hurt.
Addressing AI Bias Via Swarm Intelligence
AI programs are sometimes biased—generally attributable to historic knowledge that displays societal prejudices, generally attributable to intentional manipulation. These biases can reinforce discrimination, perpetuate stereotypes, and undermine belief in AI. Swarm intelligence gives a possible path to mitigating bias:
Decentralization: By aggregating insights from numerous brokers or nodes, swarm programs can scale back the affect of any single biased perspective.Dynamic suggestions: Actual-time interplay and consensus constructing may help determine and proper outlier or biased inputs.Human-in-the-loop: Swarm AI platforms that hold people actively engaged in choice making may help be certain that a broader vary of values and sensibilities are represented.
Nonetheless, swarm intelligence is just not a panacea:
Human swarms can nonetheless amplify bias if the group is just not genuinely numerous or if social pressures suppress dissent.Swarm AI programs require cautious design to make sure transparency, range, and mechanisms for bias detection and correction.Decentralized studying may help scale back the chance of bias launched by any single dataset or actor, particularly when mixed with applied sciences like blockchain for transparency and auditability.
The benefits of swarm intelligence lengthen far past easy error correction. When designed effectively, swarms can incorporate numerous views, right for particular person errors, and even attain extra moral selections. However with out safeguards, they’ll additionally enlarge collective blind spots and ethical failings.
The Knowledge of Small Issues
I hold coming again to these ants within the mountains round Jerusalem. Individually, they’re unremarkable—tiny bugs with brains smaller than poppy seeds. However collectively, they resolve issues that problem our most subtle AI programs.
Their secret isn’t superintelligence—it’s collective intelligence. They present us that probably the most sturdy selections usually emerge not from particular person brilliance, however from the affected person interplay of many minds working collectively towards shared objectives.
But, as people, our collective intelligence is a double-edged sword. It could possibly produce each knowledge and folly, justice and injustice. If we wish to harness swarm intelligence for AI alignment and bias discount, we should design our programs with humility, vigilance, and a deep understanding of each the promise and peril of the human swarm.
As we stand on the edge of really autonomous AI programs, maybe it’s time we stopped attempting to construct excellent particular person brokers and began studying from the democracy of ants. The way forward for AI alignment might not lie in creating superintelligent programs, however in orchestrating not-so-intelligent ones into one thing higher than the sum of their components.
The ants have been displaying us the best way for tens of millions of years. Are we smart sufficient to comply with their lead—and be taught from our personal historical past?
