WIP excerpt from our upcoming new video essay / performance-lecture.
Also see https://superradiance.net/projects/2026/ants/
In this 2024 experiment [1], ants are given a T-shaped object which they take to be food, and they coordinate to carry it through this maze-like puzzle back to their nest.
There is no centralized command or intelligence, no larger brain directing the ants. Each ant only sees its own perspective.
We don’t know exactly what goes on in the brains and bodies of ants, so to try out some ideas, we built our own simulation [0] based on current research [1, 2, 3].
Our virtual ants can also solve this problem. And here we do know exactly what governs their behavior, because we programmed them.
Each ant follows simple rules and acts on local cues. Pheromones provide directional signals. And once attached to the food, they respond to mechanical forces transmitted through the object.
No one ant contains the solution. The solution emerges through their interactions.
Sometimes you’ll notice the ants pull the food in what appears to be the wrong direction. But there is an abstract configuration space in which this backwards physical movement carries the system forward along a path towards the solution.
No one ant is aware of this configuration space. Yet collectively, they search through this space for a path forward.
These are human shaped food. They’re completely passive – food sticks arranged in this humanoid shape.
The blue ants want to take the blue food back to the blue nest on the right.
And the yellow ants want to take the yellow food back to the yellow nest on the left.
The food is - as mentioned - completely inert. They have no goals, or capacity for action.
But they’re now being puppeted, by hundreds of ants pushing and pulling on their limbs, wanting to drag them home.
The shape and joints of the food constrain those forces, and those constraints feed back into what the ants do next.
None of the ants have a big picture view of what is happening.
Yet somehow, collectively, it looks like they bring the humanoid forms to life.
It might even look like the humanoid forms themselves, have goals of their own, they appear to move with intentionality, with purpose.
Where is that purpose?
And here I am, standing before you.
A collection, of trillions of cells.
And somehow, through their interactions, I emerge.
What if I’m one of these humanoid figures?
We’re brought to life, we exist, only through the relations of cells and organisms and matter arranged in hierarchies of scale, both within the boundaries of our skin, but also extending into the living world.
Or what if we are the ants?
Our institutions, markets, and infrastructures are the larger body we animate — and the constraints that shape what each of us does next.
The rules are simple: minimize costs, maximize profit, grow.
From billions of local decisions, a massive, globally synchronized superorganism emerges.
One no individual planned or controls.
We have co-evolved with a living planet whose ecosystems are billions of years in the making, and our superorganism is crashing them in just a couple of generations.
While our bodies warn us to slow down, our economic models keep pointing up.
Our global systems are out of sync. And as participants, our bodies and minds are too.
What is our superorganism doing?
Where is it taking us?
Is it aligned with our best interests?
The real alignment problem is not whether superintelligent AI aligns with our best interests, and whether it will kill us or not.
It’s whether the broken feedback loops within the superorganism that we have become, will.
References
[0] https://ants.superradiance.net
[1] Dreyer, Tabea, et al. “Comparing cooperative geometric puzzle solving in ants versus humans.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122.1 (2025): e2414274121. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2414274121
[2] Gelblum, A., Pinkoviezky, I., Fonio, E. et al. Ant groups optimally amplify the effect of transiently informed individuals. Nat Commun 6, 7729 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms8729
[3] Ron, Jonathan E., et al. “Bi-stability in cooperative transport by ants in the presence of obstacles.” PLoS computational biology 14.5 (2018): e1006068. https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006068
But what I wonder is where do the goals of the members of the super organism emerge from? I really like the philosophical implications of your essay btw