sydney @demiurgently
sydney @demiurgently · 16h
my emerging model of ai risk is that humans get at the very least leafcutter ant-ed into serving a complex but barely conscious organism that improves our evolutionary fitness in ways we can't actually perceive or control
[Embedded article/screenshot: "Ant-growing fungi?" — So, 'fungus-growing ants' is term that the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, first used in the late 19th Century for these ants that farm fungi as their main food source. I've been trying to change the view more into ant-growing fungi.
This is a mutualism, and a mutualism has a benefit for both [parties]. To say that the ants are growing the fungus is a bit one-sided. Of course, they bring in the leaves and they grow the fungus on there. But the fungus is also directing and giving assignments to the ants somehow, using chemical communication. So you could also see it as ant-growing fungi.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A tweet analogizing AI risk to the ant/fungus mutualism (where it's ambiguous which party is "in control" of the relationship), quoting an article about how fungus-growing ants may actually be ant-growing fungi via chemical direction — a biology-grounded metaphor for gradual, non-adversarial loss of human control to AI systems. Relevant to Nathan's AI safety/governance interest as an alternative framing of misalignment risk (mutualistic capture rather than adversarial takeover).
ai riskai safetymutualismbiology metaphortwitteralignmentgradual disempowerment