Re:An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t h...
by ghettoimp on Thursday January 16, 2020 @12:08PM
(#22066476)
This was a fantastic book, and the first thing I thought of when seeing the article.
Re:An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t h...
by n4r9 on Thursday January 16, 2020 @12:59PM
(#22067072)
Like the other commenter I also instantly thought of this fantastic book (and follow-up).
The even stronger analogy between OP's article and the book is what happens before the spiders cultivate the ants, and the knowledge that the spiders take from them. Before the spiders were building ant-computers the collective ant colony was making its own conscious decisions and was actually winning the intelligence race for a while.
In the second book, her brain is then duplicated across multiple colonies. Because the ant computer isn't as powerful as silicon based computers, one of her instances later realizes that she is a significantly compressed version of herself and that she doesn't have most of the old memories, capabilities or capacity for emotions that her human self had, presumably in large part also due to being transferred between three different substrates (flesh, silicon, ants).
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25499718-children-of-tim...