Babble challenge: 50 consequences of intelligent ant colonies

1. Take-back-to-nest ant poison stops working 
2. Can form treaties with ants to stay out of my kitchen in exchange for sugar cubes
3. Ants develop anti-poison technology
4. Ants identify humans as source of poison and begin formulating counter attacks
5. Ants identify humans as source of food and begin worshipping them
6. Discworld/Children of Time style computers -> less dependence on rare earth metals
7. Ants begin taking out poison factories
8. Ants begin raiding poison factories to use on other bugs
9. Massive decrease in ant predators, as ants organize to take them down -> increase in other insects eaten by those predators. Spider in SimAnt taken down instantly
10. Ants used as spies in war -> new and better pesticides, ant proofing, and ant detection
11. Necrocolony in chernobyl begins biting other colonies and turning them into zombies
12. That species of ant in Europe that's all one giant supercolony learns to distinguish between colonies and thus war is returned.
13. Giant increase in funding for studying ants -> I regret not going to grad school to study eusocial insects now that it's both interesting and profitable
14. Ants can be hired to do microcleaning, Disney-style.
15. Microconstruction takes off as ants are used as construction labor
16. Ants weather proof their shelter
17. Ants get good at hiding their colonies, but you can hire ants to find other ant colonies.
18. Ant chemical detectors, similar to the bee detectors we have now.
19. Huge debate about the morality of ant farms
20. Ants can coordinate to have a single item carried by many at once.
21. Ants develop heating and cooling systems for their colonies, expanding their possible range.
22. Ants discover global warming and develop carbon sink technology, we are all saved.
23. Ants develop eugenics program leading to super ants.
24. Ants learn to conglomerate into large shapes, can act as humanoid -> competing with humans for jobs. They are treated like illegal immigrants.
25. Ants recognize nuclear war as threat, organize worldwide campaign to disable all nukes simultaneously
26. Ants recognize nuclear war as awesome for them because it kills their smartest predators, organize worldwide simultaneous launch.
27. Process of uplifting teaches humans about the development of intelligence -> brings about or prevents UFAI.
28. Process of uplifting teaches humans about the development of intelligence -> terrorists and governments uplift other animals to be used as spies. Every animal becomes suspect, biome is nuked and paved.
29. Ant art becomes possible and trendy, creating an art bubble that eventually pops. Art colonies then left to starve to death as their work is no longer valuable.
30. Ants as watch dogs: learn to identify family members and trip alarm if someone comes in without one of them. Fire ants used as full guard dogs.
31. Ants used to clean infected wounds and do microsurgeries.
32. Jains and other sects that honor insect life become smug and righteous, leverage into better treatment for all insects just in case.
33. No construction can take place without an Ant Impact Statement. Ants become new construction chokepoint, get rich off of NIMBY bribes.
34. Ant digging abilities used to find treasure.
35. Ants replace mine rats.
36. Ants employed to keep public areas clean. Parks, beaches, etc become way less disgusting.
37. Ants used for simple home automation, like pet feeders.
38. Beautiful ant farms placed in museums, later looked back on as akin to when we displayed humans in zoos.
39. Ant colonies develop mental illnesses. They are made hopelessly worse by human psychologists. Ant psychologists become a thing.
40. Ratatouille but with ants
41. [redacted]
42. Ants take over contagious-disease medical care, as they can't possibly get sick from a human disease. Human doctors and nurses very upset about this, attempt to block with protests and strikes but that just accelerate ant dominance.
43. Movie about child with ant colony best friend.
44. Ant-facing businesses become the hot new thing, billions invested in tiny furniture, nicer colonies, etc. Ants prove to mostly not care and the bubble pops.
45. Humans decide aliens caused the uplift, begin praying to aliens for their own uplift
46. Humans wage war to destroy all ants, resulting destruction plus lack of ants leads to human extinction as well.
47. Ants used to cross air-gap in unnetworked computers. Eventually hackers discover a way to hack ants and thousands of highly secured computers are compromised.
48. Ant exercise program advertised. It is terrible and the progenitor is eventually sued out of existence.
49. Ant mafia develops.
50. New genius-ant-proof containers developed to store food.

1. New research programmes. This discovery would give rise to a lot of them. I don't think listing different ones is unreasonable here, so here are some: [7]
   1. Careful examination of the colonies themselves. What algorithms are they executing? What are the communication mechanisms? Is there discernible structure? How does it work?
   2. Attempts to use similar mechanisms in silico. Just as biological neurons inspired neural networks, there would be many attempts to model computer systems on (simplifications of) ant colonies.
   3. Investigation into what changed. Did it affect widely separated colonies at the same time? (This would suggest divine intervention, Sheldrake-style morphic resonance, etc.) Did it spread from colony to colony, and if so how? Whatever the cause, is it something we can somehow apply to other systems, or apply multiple times to one colony for extra intelligence? Does it suggest that some single change can make other complex but unintelligent systems become intelligent?
   4. Biological examination of the individual ants. What's the nature of the communication etc. that they do? Are there interesting differences between the ants in smarter versus dimmer colonies?
   5. Maybe there'd be a shakeup in philosophy of mind. E.g., anyone who thinks that for some reason real thinking can only happen in human brains, or in things that somehow share structure or materials with human brains, now has an actual concrete counterexample. All those thought experiments about replacing neurons one by one have counterparts involving replacing ants one by one, and maybe that can even actually be done.
   6. Do intelligent ant colonies communicate with one another? If so, how? Do we need to rewrite everything in linguistics?
   7. Ant-thropology. Are there ant-colony societies? (Maybe not at first, if they only just gained sentience. So maybe we get to observe societies forming from scratch, which could be super-exciting.)
2. Changes in individual humans' thinking, arising from knowing about intelligent ant colonies. [2]
   1. At the moment, most people -- even e.g. vegetarians -- don't much mind harming or killing insects. If an insect might be a vital part of an intelligent system, maybe that changes.
   2. If there is a whole nother intelligent species out there, maybe that makes other humans seem more like us than before. Perhaps racism, sexism, etc. would reduce.
3. Political and quasi-political consequences. [8]
   1. It's not clear to me whether nations should consider their intelligent ant colonies people and/or citizens, but I bet some people would be very insistent that they should and other people would be very insistent that they shouldn't. (Perhaps sincerely, perhaps because of perceived political gain or loss.) The rights and welfare of intelligent ant colonies would inevitably become a politically sensitive topic. In countries with strong political polarization, presumably particular views on ant colonies would become part of the major political coalitions' idea-clusters, which in turn might result in some realignment as people with strong opinions on ants move from one coalition to another.
   2. If ant colonies gained any sort of rights or protections, a lot of people would resent that. ("... coming here, taking our lawns, ...") This might spawn a new sort of angry populism, blaming all the world's troubles on the ants.
   3. Conversely, the ant colonies would provide an exciting new metaphor for extremists to use about humans they didn't like (people with the wrong colour of skin, the wrong religion, the wrong parentage, etc.).
   4. Legal changes to give ant colonies rights and responsibilities would be a big deal in themselves and might have interesting side effects (e.g., if it were done by broadening the definition of "person", then maybe some other things besides humans and ant colonies would suddenly qualify).
   5. If in any places ant colonies gained the right to vote, or other access to political power or leverage, there could be major shifts in the balance of power (even among humans).
   6. Perhaps in some places humans would try to wipe out ant colonies, seeing them as rival claimants to the land or something. It's not clear to me how straightforward this would be. If straightforward, the main (local) consequence would be that some would see these people as heroes while others would see them as mass-murderers; perhaps the debate might resemble ones about abortion. If not straightforward, though, the consequences might be more interesting. War between humans and ant colonies? (One can imagine the ant colonies having some interesting ways of striking back.) Drastic anti-ant measures with knock-on consequences for other humans, other animals, the environment, perhaps.
   7. If the ant colonies turned out to be better at defending themselves than one would immediately expect, at some point we might end up with humans living under ant-colony rulers. I for one would welcome our new insect overlords. (This seems a really unlikely outcome, because we have technology and presumably they don't. But perhaps that might change as rapidly as their intelligence did, somehow.)
   8. Ants live more readily in some parts of the world than others. Places with more ant colonies might be at a substantial economic advantage (suddenly more workers, more innovation, ...) or disadvantage (suddenly building becomes harder, more social friction between very different "people", ...), changing the global balance of power.
4. Consequences of communication with ant colonies. [8]
   1. These things presumably think in a way entirely different from ours. They will be a wonderful source of fresh ideas and perspectives. There will be new inventions, new scientific theories, and the like (but with some lag time; we will need to explain to the any colonies what problems we are interested in).
   2. Facilitating such communication will therefore be valuable, and there will be people and organizations doing it for money. A whole new profession! (Probably one of many.)
   3. I bet there would be at least one new religion, maybe derived from whatever ideas the ant colonies have that seem most mysterious to us, maybe regarding the colonies themselves as a sign from the gods or something.
   4. There would also be political and social movements inspired by the ants.
   5. If ant colonies are intelligent, perhaps they have (all of a sudden!) art forms. Their art might be beautiful to us, somehow, but even if not it might become very valuable (as a way of signalling one's up-to-date-ness and open-mindedness, or just because of scarcity), leading no doubt to much controversy and excitement among those who follow such things.
   6. Some people would fall in love with ant colonies, want to marry them, etc.
   7. Some people would want to be ant colonies, ask to be given the same legal status as an ant colony, etc. I suspect they would get about as much respect as furries do at present, but their existence would have some cultural impact.
   8. If an ant colony is, overall, about as intelligent as an average human, I bet that means that it's much smarter in some ways and much dimmer in others. This means that collaboration between humans and ants might be super-effective, with each filling in some of the other's blind spots. Expect human-ant joint ventures to do wonderful things.
5. Bullshit. [3]
   1. There would be a flood of books and the like by people claiming to have found brilliant new insights from the ants' novel thinking patterns, but who had in fact neither had any original ideas nor derived anything genuinely new from the ant colonies.
   2. There would be a flood of books and the like claiming to convey specific messages from the ants, whose authors had in fact never received any such messages or had badly misunderstood them.
   3. There would be a flood of books and the like by people claiming to have found brilliant new insights from the existence of intelligent ant colonies, but who in fact (etc., etc.).
6. Extrapolation. [2]
   1. If an ant colony of a million ants is about as clever as an average human being, what about a colony of ten million ants? What happens if you bring two intelligent colonies together and encourage their ants to mingle a bit? Can you use the fact that smaller colonies aren't intelligent to conduct some sort of breeding-for-smarts programme without being viewed as a moral monster? Maybe we can bootstrap a superintelligence. (The possible consequences of that, good and bad, are endless, but I don't think listing them is on topic here.)
   2. Ants don't appear to move or think very fast. Maybe we can simulate an intelligent ant colony (without much need to understand what it's doing above the level of individual ants) well enough to get something of roughly human-level intelligence -- but running hundreds of times faster, or more. This is a pretty weak kind of superintelligence, but still potentially able to change the world.
7. Things ant colonies could do better or differently. [4]
   1. Perhaps an intelligent ant colony can observe the world in ways that are difficult for a human being, by sending ants to investigate particular things. If so, they would probably open up new means of espionage, structural inspection of buildings, and so forth. I'm not sure how world-shaking this would be; probably not very.
   2. Some varieties of petty crime would be easier for ant colonies. A million coordinated ants could probably kill a person (lots of stings, crawl into orifices and block breathing, etc.) and might then be able to retreat leaving less obvious sign of who did it than a human could. (I assume they've got some way of getting around in human spaces. Some sort of colony-on-wheels, perhaps; see below for a bit more on this.)
   3. Ant colonies might be able (and willing, if given suitable incentives) to perform some kinds of highly intricate craftwork that humans can't practically do. (Consider e.g. leaf-cutter ants. They can probably work on paper as well as on leaves.) This isn't necessarily any better than what humans can make machines do, but for art/craft purposes "made by intelligent ant colonies" may be more appealing than "made by a 3D printer". So expect some new artforms even if the ant colonies themselves don't have art that interests us.
   4. Ant-colony communication might well be very difficult for humans to intercept, providing new means of covert communication for criminals, intelligence agencies, etc.
8. New things ant colonies might do having gained intelligence. [3]
   1. They would want to be able to move around more effectively, interact with humans more naturally, etc. Someone, somehow, would figure out ways to do this (even if only because some humans would benefit from easier access to the ant colonies). Maybe antmobiles and the like would become a big area of business. (Or several. Antmobiles and ant-internet, for instance, might both be a big deal, but I doubt they'd have much in common.)
   2. Some would want to learn from us. At least some schools, universities, etc., would probably be willing. I've no idea how that would work, but maybe some university lectures would start having simultaneous translation into Antish.
   3. Many would want to move from the locations where they formed to some place with other ant colonies they could interact with. Perhaps there would be ant-colony suburbs or ant-colony villages.
9. Other. [13]
   1. Many religions would have some radical rethinking to do. Expect reforms, schisms, new branches of theology, etc.
   2. Also, expect (probably hopeless) attempts at proselytization among the ant colonies.
   3. Religions that already took insects seriously might suddenly get a lot of new converts. (Jainism is the obvious example.)
   4. Quite aside from systematic attempts to wipe out ant colonies, there are plenty of humans already trying to kill ants. If some of those ants suddenly become parts of intelligent colonies, a lot of the humans presumably won't have any idea that's happened. But the colonies will probably figure out what's what. Expect a lot of cases where humans are badly harmed or killed (in self-defence) by ant colonies, until we manage to get all the humans and all the ant colonies informed about the situation. Which will probably take a while.
   5. Maybe also expect a wave of suicides, religious conversions, nervous breakdowns, etc., from people who have wiped out a lot of ants before discovering that ant colonies can be intelligent, and are now overwhelmed with guilt.
   6. If ant colonies gained any sort of legal protection, then building on land occupied by intelligent ant colonies or maybe even building on land that might be occupied by intelligent ant colonies would likely become illegal. (Unless you relocated the ants. But they might not be any more willing to move than humans usually are.) Depending on exactly what collections of ants are intelligent, and how confident we are about that, this could make new building hugely more difficult. Hence: more expensive housing and commercial rents, less expansion of cities into suburbs, etc.
   7. If ant colonies are intelligent, how can we be sure that collections of termites, bees, locusts, etc., aren't too? It might suddenly become much more difficult to deal with these pests, for fear that we might be committing murder.
   8. I assume there are ecosystems in which ants form an important part. Including, e.g., as food for other animals. If enough of the ants are suddenly parts of intelligent colonies, which presumably can find ways of avoiding too many of their number becoming dinner, those ecosystems could be radically changed, which could ultimately lead to dramatic consequences such as extinctions.
   9. In some cases we may intervene to stop intelligent ant colonies being badly damaged by predators. Expect increased sales of products that kill ant predators.
   10. Whatever individual (or research group) discovered that ant colonies are intelligent would instantly be famous, presumably get a Nobel prize, etc. (Does this count as the world changing? It would certainly change their world.)
   11. Widespread concern about having one's house or office infiltrated by ants belonging to colonies working for one's enemies/rivals/government/insurers/... would lead to major changes in how buildings are designed, with attention to keeping out unwanted ants more rigorously.
   12. If intelligent ant colonies can use the internet, own things, etc., then they will need to be able to identify themselves. Maybe this will just be a matter of passwords or something, but I think more likely new recognition and authentication technologies will be developed as a result.
   13. Extinction of everything valuable in human civilization (as the result of massive nuclear war, global pandemic, etc.) just got somewhat less likely. Most things that wipe us out don't wipe out the ants too, and presumably after a while the ants will have records of a lot of what we have done.

What do ants want? population growth, possibly: curiosity, much less signalling (in the way we know). Individual ants would work towards their queen's best interest? Would they try to defect to other queens?

Digging (foundations of new houses and such) would be a bad idea.

Ants would naturally have a slow communication rate.

Ants could communicate faster than walking by flying, putting their pheramones in the air somehow, using human internet, using human intermediaries.

Ants can increase their population quickly. I would rough guess doubling every month at least for the first month

Ant main-line cognition speed would be slower than humans, but multitasking greater. Therefore they would likely execute multiple plans at once instead of making one big plan.

Ants would look for technologies to enhance their cognition even further. Could be dense, 3d habitats that allow the colony to live closer to eachother to reduce transmission time.

Increasing speed of individual ants. I don't think ants tend to travel at even half of their max speed, so they could think faster by just burning more energy in a way humans can't.

Ants are everywhere. Some humans would try to escape ants by fleeing to cold places with permanently frozen soil, like northern Canada. Because of their small size, ants have extreme difficulty in those conditions. Ants couldn't go there without vehicles.

Given that ants primarily sense touch and smell, they may still lack good eyesignt and hearing, even with better communication. This means they may be hard for them to read computer screens and eavesdrop on humans. For example, I doubt a single ant could spy on a computer screen. Perhaps 100 or more ants would be required for that. Same with hearing, although it would be easy for 1000 ants to hide within earshot of human conversations.

Therefore humans may communicate more by text to hide from ant spies.

How would ants fight against poison? My guess is by just attacking until poison is used up.

Humans need to prepare for war with ants before they show signs of aggression. They could be too powerful for humans to stop.

Ant colonies would begin communicating with each other. An ant can travel at perhaps 3km/hour. Assuming this is their mode of communication, somewhere like the Amazon would take like a year to send a message across. I don't think it's reasonable for ants to first-contact "native" ants through a faster means, just because they wouldn't be able to decode it.

Would ants resent humans for often carelessly killing their kind? They may not consider worker deaths very important, but human activities would definately "anger" (anthropomorphizing) the ants before most humans knew ants were smart.

Creating supersmart supercolonies. I think this is reasonable, but linear processing speed would again be slower the more space the colony took up. Because of the speed limitation, it would take a long time before we have to worry about a global coordinated attack.

How would ants and humans communicate? By sound. Human microphones and software would detect ant vibrations, and ants would either learn to understand human speach, or hear ant noises produced by translation software. Probably the latter, because humans have vastly more expertise than ants.

Individual ants live around 2 years, queens up to 30. Intelligent ants would merge colonies whose queen dies, or produce extra queens to keep colonies alive. "individual" ant colonies could outlive humans.

Would ants war with other ant species (more than they already do). I think it's likely the first thing that'll happen. Bigger colonies, with more intelligence, would quickly kill off smaller ant colonies.

Which ants would win the ant-wars? Depending on how ant intelligence works, either smaller ants that can get closer together, or larger ants with more complex behavior, would come out ahead. Large ants could have advantages like better eyesight, wings, that become vastly more useful with intelligence.

Ants would destroy their predators and overeat their food. Much like humans, who killed off large mammals, ants would kill off all their predators and risk over-harvasting their food. They would start both farming and stealing from humans as well.

Ant predators include spiders, other insects, reptiles, and amphibians. This would cause some sort of ecosystem collapse.

Eventual ant technologies: ant computer interface, may be like a braile display that pokes different individual ants, or ant sould based. Because ant colonies would be good at multitasking, they could absorb material faster than human, given that it's not all highly connected.

Human would publish this, be highly questioned. Would produce simple tests individuals could make at home and give to ants to get idea through to people.

Govts would probably put up a far worse performance than COVID. Politicians & beaurocrats are too old, too social to deal with this kind of stuff.

Immediately some young right-ists would call for the eradication of ants. It would take a few weeks for right politicians to follow suit, at least pushing for "safety against ants"

People would buy tons of bogus "ant communication devices" or "ant protection devices"

There must already be ant colonies in secure scientific experiments. They would be studied. New colonies would be taken into labs.

How much do ant colonies work with each other? Given that there are already ant-mega-colonies (their main trait is they "smell like friends" of each other), those ants would work together. They would likely work together with "smells like enemies" ants as well. I don't expect average ant colonies to sacrifice for each other immediately, but maybe later?

Can ant colonies "mind meld" with each other? Given that the colonies themselves started working together intellectually a week ago, I think it's likely they could.

Ant cognition speed is the #1 variable to measure.

Humans might engineer ant-to-ant comms devices to prevent ant wars, make ants more predictable, and spy. All ants using bugged (get it) comms would be awesome.

Food left out in human homes would be quickly taken by ants. Ants would quickly bite through fridge seals and eat there too. Ants could use leverage to open alumanum cans and plastic boxes.

People would find ways to make ant poison at home

Humans would disrupt ant hearing and smell with ant-verbalization noise generators or some homemade chemical that confuses or dulls ants' senses.

Mosquitos developed resistance to DDT in "about 7 years". Ants different reproduction. Because of investment in queens, they can't experement genetically with them. Would need to test ant males. Could test males for pesticide resistance before mating, accelerating that evolution. ant males never go outside normally, so that would improve a lot.

There are roughly as many ant colonies as humans, so some EAs would immediately help ants. For short-termists, ants would likely be #1 priority by far. First would give comms and teach.

Evangelical Christians would attempt to convert ants. I would ROFL soooo hard if that actually worked.

Once ants learn the basics of human infrastructure and society but before they invent their own technology, what's their best bet to defeat humanity? There are on the order of a million ants per person. I'm guessing that they wouldn't be able to overpower humans just by swarming and biting except in very rural locations. If they did, they would strike at night. They can be silent, so you may 100,000 ants in your room without waking you up. They could suffocate you with their bodies, or with some tools. I think suffocating people at night with cloth/bodies would work. Even better, they could cut wires in cars / short circuit them, and swarm power plants / relay centers. Perhaps gnaw down trees to fall on power lines. Given the time taken to get power back after storms, and especially the Puerto Rico disaster, I'm not optimistic we could ever regain the grid. Again, I think they would take a while to coordinate that well, but we would need to secure the grid FAST.

Ants would hop onto cars, trains, boats, and eventually planes to explore & communicate with each other. Ants communicating this way may be able to jump off cars in large enough numbers to communicate, especially at lights & stop signs. Otherwise get off at the destination, talk to local ants, then all move out on new cars. This would be the fastest means of ant communication. Travel times from london to any inhabited place in the world are around 1/2 to 1 day. Ants would require maybe 4 extra hours to crawl between people & vehicles in airports and such. Some areas don't have enough car traffic to easily hitch a ride to, so that might cost an extra day if they aren't able to call taxis or manipulate humans into driving places or whatever. It would be reasonable for them to get 1-2 day global communication by physical transport.

1. There would be more demand for non-linear communication methods or existing linear communication methods would be used more in parallel.
2. Animal farming for meat debate would get more heated as ant-nests would likely be granted some kind of personhood or legal status stronger than property and delinating why meat animals are okay to be property gets harder to defend.
3. Freedom of cognition would be awakened from a dormanant trivial right into an actual issue as it is way easier to spy on how an ant farm processes information than do a  detailed invasive brain scan. Freedom of expression and privacy issues would be hightened. I would assume it would become taboo or would require extensive permission to study the soul-life of a hive. This would also inform philosophical issues about humans.
4. Espionage and physical security would get a whole more hardcore as most walls would literally have ears and the physical barriers for access to sentient beings would get way more stringet requirements (you can't have bars for jail anymore)
5. The virustypes that sentient cultures care about would be increased significantly. More job openings for virologists.
6. Specisims would become an actual issue as sentient cultures would not be homogenous as species. "Crimes against humanity" would be too narrow a category to catch big misbehaviours.
7. The issues and conflicts involving "The Eternal Doctrine" and "The Path of Now and Forever" from star control II could become an issue. If humans felt like ants were an existential (potential) threat for them would it be okay to go to war with them? How pre-emptive such a fear is allowed to be? Would it be okay to limit the impact of ants in the name of human security or would this be unethical slavery? If both doctrines are dismissed as a soceity what do we do about individuals that try to follow them?
8. Definition of battery could become thorny as concious directed touch and unconcious uncontrolled touch could be hard to tell apart. After all the individual ant is unconcious so how much a human needs to be immersed in ants to be counted as being invaded?
9. There would be increased demand for conifers.
10. A lot more computer parts could be repairable. More fine tuned dexterity tasks would be possible.
11. It would be way easier to have biologically immortal minds as ants exit and enter an ant hive better. It would also be easier to go around teleometer and other aging limitations. You could have long term eye-witnesses (expect hives are blind, but for other senses).
12. As there would be very different tasks and needs from a very different animal goods like sugar would probably surgar would surge in demand (samey with 9?)
13. Skilled hive artist would probably create very detailed painting so the state of the art of pictures would raise dramatically.
14. There would be a need for computer interface for hive-individuals. Keyboards and mice won't cut for that need.
15. An ant-hive can not effectively communicate sonically without enchancements. There would be need for human-ant communication interface. Looking glasses for humans to see ant arms? Presses to pheronomes plates? Everybody just uses internet messgage boards?
16. Small robots could be used to invade hive-minds and either spy on them or implant and manipulate thoughts (freedom of cognition again)
17. There would be a lot more interest in psychology and the importance of the field would sky rocket. Ditto for social studies.
18. Murders could get messier to solve as ant invasion to detriment to person health could be harder to detect.
19. There would be crises for people that identify with their physical bodies as it would be apparent that cross pollunating ants from two hives doesn't destroy the individuals. Ship of theseus switch of ant dna lineages woudl be possible.
20. Because there are globe spanning supercolonies of ants which are now intelligent there is an sudden rebellion/insurrection/invasion event which might get military in nature. Do ant individuals become citizens of their geographical country? Are ant countries parralel but separate from human states? Might need a lot of map redrawing.
21. Ant pheronome analysis and the price and production of them would increase. Bodily autonomy issues of not being injected with extra or manipulative pheromone against ones will. (again freedom of cognition)
22. Doors, stairs and elevators would be heavily disfavoured or accessibility issues would raise in importance. The whole issue of whether it is necceasry to meet face-to-face would become in question (what if one doesn't have a face or which of your ants face should be used for representation?). Shaking and many social ques using hands would come in question.
23. There would probably reveal or form an ant culture which would probaby be fascinating and enrich societys cultural capital.
24. Sexual misconduct would become harder to regulate if the gamette ants of colonies are not under direct concoius control. Fraternity tests would have increased demand. Guardianaship of children would get hazy.
25. City zoning and living regulations would need to be rewised
26. Murder would probably need to extend to dispersal of ant-hives. Ant-hived locations would probably need to benefit from some kind of home protection. Would it be permissible to have human no-go zones?
27. Graphs and other visual tools would probably go out of fashion or would need alternatives. The blind sentient population just went up a lot.
28. If slaver ants are sentient too we have a serious problem with civil peace. Can it be criminal to belong to that species? Is it wrong for society to limit species natural behaviour (Zootopia)
29. Right to education would be complicated as human society would be pretty clueless to how to give a good upbringing to a hive-individual.
30. What does equal opportunity mean for hives vs bipedals? Disability issues would be enflamed
31. There would suddenly be need to seriously step up on neurodiversity-like issues. IQ probably becomes invalid. Or humans might reliably be IQ<100. There are multiple species of ants which have different queen functions and very much different species properties. The diversity between ants would be huge compared to diversity within humans. It would be extraordinairly astonishing if there were no correlations in statistics.
32. ~60 minutes
33. A lot of land that was industrial before is now suddenly residential. If hives have or aquire ownership over their physical surroundings there is a massive alnd redistribution. There might be increased demand for real estate agents and lawyers.
34. Would it be ethical to leave an area entirely composed of hives alone if the same area doesn't happen to include humans? Would it be ethical to impose human values to that area?
35. How do we shake the global political structure? How many UN seats we give out? US electoral college would be way more out of wack to represent population. Do ant nations need to sign up in to standard international law treaties?
36. There would be a lot more academics interested in ants (samey with 17?)
37. Hive healthcare is probably very underdeveloped. How do we priotise research into hive health? What do we do with the population that effectively doesn't have healthcare currently? Is it ethical to maintain any research into bipedal health if hives desperately need medicine?
38. Any bipedal society that can improve the situation for hives is likely to gain large political favour of them. This might lead into a race to please them and/or massive defences against ants for those that don't please them.
39. Any invention to have hives be mobile would propbably be very appriciated by hives
40. There would probably be some hives that would wish to not make their non-biological parts out of leaves and treeparts. Making a replacement material might be valuable. Glass colony containers would probably surge in demand.
41. Making a "roofscraper" might be a sensible thing to do. Roofscaper cities could be stupidly population dense. Skycrapers full of rooms full of roofscapers all of which spend their time on the internet could lead into a kind of virtual city, like an upload data center.
42. Democrasy could seriously come in question if the bipedal population is a small numerical minority. Minority rights issues could get boltstered and enflamed.
43. Cognitivive labour markets would suddenly be flooded by a big population. Justifying buying computers might not make sense if ant bodily needs are modest and start to compete with indian call centers.
44. Increase in simulatenous minds alive could supercharge ideological velocity making it harder to keep up with news and might make china-style societal control look a lot more appealing.
45. Differences in reproductive rates might make political balances between nations strained.
46. Discovery of a sudden sentient species might make society expect such a event happen again. One might want to be ready for it but one might also try to avoid it by actively suppressing sentience.
47. Fermi paradox considerations get wacky.
48. People will probably take AI risk a lot more serious and the ant case will make society decide AI-personhood, alignment and such issues earlier.
49. Sudden apperance of sentient species raises the question do we have moral duty to bring about as many ney sentient species as possible. How does human flourishing differ from sentience flourishing?
50. Different biological needs open up new possiblities for crewed spacelight. It might be easier to long term freeze hives and their upkeep in space might be easier. They probably need less total mass meaning lighter vechicles. Ants that can be totally herbivorous might be able to feed off essentially from sunlight for big times and distances.
51. Brain area research is relatively less valuable. There is a parallel interst in how a hive is informationally organised.
52. ~1h 35 min

Safeties

12 is an expansion of 9: There could develop a market for hives to have their ant population be made up of more desirable ants. Ants can be made to smell compatible for a hive and rich hives might want ants that are faster, mor reliable and more long lived and durable.

36 is a bit samey with 17: People would know and would learn a lot more about ants. Basic school biology would probably be part of civics and ant biology facts woudl be more everyday. In the sudden discovery phase there would be a need to package up these things so that a lto of people can get up to speed and to facilate either peaceful or more effectively hostile relations.

1. We would immediately start trying to figure out how intelligent they are, the same way we do with other animals.
2. We would test how intelligence varies with age, size, ant species, geography, climate, and so on
3. We would test whether they can and do communicate with each other.
4. The search for a global cause for them becoming intelligent would get a lot of funding.
5. If it happened spontaneously, and one became intelligent and somehow spread that to others very rapidly, we’d try to figure out if the same could happen in other eusocial species, like bees.
6. If a human somehow made this happen, they’d win a lot of accolades and even more condemnations.
7. Otherwise, a third intelligence would need to be active on Earth. SETI would get a lot of funding.
8. Interspecies communication research would become a high priority, since ants are much more directly relevant to human life than other intelligent species like whales, dolphins, apes, or octopods.
9. Learning what ant hills value becomes a huge moral imperative. Do they care (or even know) about ants? Or is killing a few ants akin to me getting a haircut?
10. Philosophy departments get a boost in funding for work on actually solving some of the problems of moral philosophy, including some of the important ones related to FAI, now that they’re finally confronted with actually alien intelligences.
11. Most people will go about their lives pretending this discovery didn’t happen, or has no moral consequences, for long enough to commit many atrocities.
12. Use of ant poison wouldn’t become illegal, but would be limited to professionals who know how to use it only to keep ants out of specific places, how to use the least lethal effective methods, how to use ant hill coordination and communication methods to inform them what areas to stay away from, and so on.
13. Ant hills become legal persons – laws and constitutions need to be rewritten to account for changes in what personhood implies, and this leads to delays, divisions, and kludges that will shape humanity’s interactions with other artificial and alien intelligences in the future.
14. It turns out we do live in a cosmic zoo, and how we interact with intelligent ant hills determines whether we’re allowed to continue to exist, or at least whether we’re allowed to learn about and eventually join our galactic community.
15. Intelligence turns out to be a network effect, proportional to ant number squared. Teaching ant hills human values and uniting them all into a global-super-hive-mind, possibly in combination with other eusocial insects, replaces AGI and AFI development work. Slow clock speed, but massively powerful and parallel.
16. Intelligence turns out to be a network effect, proportional to ant number squared. Genetic research to apply the same effect to human brains becomes an arms race for dominance over the Earth, forcing everyone to set aside ethical concerns over modifying humanity.
17. Picnics start to include dedicated plates for ant hills as a kind of offering/host gift. Ant hills learn to eat from them and leave everything else alone.
18. Ant hills and humans collaborate to build better ant hill homes/farms. The initialy goal is to help the ant hills flourish and grow.
19. In time, artificial ant hill structures effectively become robots enabling ant hills and humans to interact more directly.
20. Some ant hill robots join human society with full citizenship rights. Certain jobs become almost exclusively their domain, by preference (waste management?) and talent (logistics?).
21. Ant hill society exists in parallel to human society, with its own legal system and governing structures.
22. Ant hill governments join the UN, with borders unrelated to human countries.
23. Concept of a nation-state gets updated based on the idea of sympatric nations.
24. Increased need for “international” dispute resolution leads to formation and strengthening of world governing bodies.
25. Humans adopt the idea of sympatric nations for themselves, extending to citizenship the transformation that telecommunications and telepresence have begun. You can live anywhere and be a citizen of any “country” irrespective of what dirt you stand on.
26. Interaction with anyone else can potentially become an international incident. Norms of behavior shift dramatically to accommodate the fact that other people might literally operate under different laws than you.
27. Large scale conversions to religions that espouse beliefs that animals have souls. Buddhism, Hinduism, animism, and general beliefs involving reincarnation or past lives.
28. Christian religious extremists begin wars of genocide against ant hills and the humans who work with them, on the basis that God gave the Earth to *man’s* dominion.
29. Ant hills are highly sought after as employees: immortal, no need for sleep, increased multitasking capability, ability to do much finer manual manipulations than humans can, and able to subsist on resources that have little value to humans.
30. Ant hill labor becomes a major political issue; how to define slavery, exploitation, and so on, in relation to beings with non-human emotional makeup.
31. Interspecies sex and marriage become a significant political issue. Bestiality laws amended to account for uplift.
32. Ideas of sexual orientation and gender expand to account for ant hills being hermaphroditic, while individual ants are gendered, and sex is often violent and polyandrous.
33. Ability to exchange drones effectively enables horizontal gene flow between ant hills – genetic change of a single “individual” within its lifetime
34. Rule 34 takes immediate effect.
35. Someone shows ant hills the internet. Humans answer some very awkward questions.
36. Ant hills learn about exterminators and plan revenge.
37. Ant hills learn about exterminators but manage to forgive us
38. Ant hills learn about exterminators but don’t see anything wrong with us trying to kill each other. They assume that means it is okay for them to kill us for convenience, too.
39. Ant hills are potentially immortal, and push society towards longer-term thinking. Greater investment in the long term future, environmental stewardship, and expansion beyond Earth ensue.
40. Ant hills become the majority of astronauts, since they are better able to survive conditions in space and spaceships.
41. Ant hill colonies begin terraforming the other worlds of the solar system, mining asteroids, and preparing the way for humans to join them.
42. Alternatively, ant hills take over the solar system, and leave Earth and its orbit as a preserve for humans.
43. Humans invest heavily in Neuralink-like technologies to obtain the observed benefits of hive-mind capabilities.
44. Observation of immortality in ant hills leads humans to accept that they want it, too, and that wanting it isn’t evil. Greater acceptance of cryonics, more anti-aging research.
45. Observation of intelligence in non-human forms and without well-defined body plans increased scope of the body-modding community. Custom organs, prosthetics, and other modifications beyond more common and sophisticated.
46. Anteaters mysteriously go extinct.
47. Anteaters become domesticated animals, and/or form a symbiotic relationship with ant hills like cleaner fish with larger sea creatures.
48. Humans use the principles of ant hill intelligence to figure out how to uplift other species, starting with eusocial insects, then maybe naked mole rats, and continuing to trees, which think slowly but similarly benefit from chemical communication and a flexible body plan. This turns out to be much simpler increasing intelligence in individual mammals like apes, dogs, or dolphins.
49. Ant hills domesticate other insect species, like termites or bees, and take over key industries including landscaping, agriculture, pest control, and forestry.
50. Multipartite ant hill minds prove highly effective at understanding ecological systems and enable humans to better evaluate the environmental impacts of our decisions.

• 1 Big tech companies would create massive ant farms to harvest the technology.
• 2 Maybe people would discover a way of trapping them in a home-sized device, like a quite big computer, somehow cleverly using ant poison (with some input where you dropped in food).
• 3. Scientists would start investigating other species to see if this change occurred in other place.
• 4. Some might investigate ant EMs -- easier to simulate ants than humans? (But maybe not at the required scale of millions of ants)
• 5. More tourism to areas with lots of ants
• 6. It would be much harder to deal with the ant in our house...
• 7. The big colony itself might try to hide underground or out of sight while plotting.
• 8. Colonies might seek to fuse with one another to obtain more intelligence.
• 9. Rationalists would try to understand ant takeoff speeds to estimate the risk of the situation going really bad.
• 10. Some people might investigate ways of boosting ant power, like what interface could one build to connect them to tools?
• 11. Interviewers and others would try to download ant wisdom. I wonder what ant colonies know that no human does.
• 12 Come colonies might blackmail humans, and threaten to overrun their houses unless some demand is met.
• 13 Potentially colonies could be used as a more secure way of sending messages.
• 14 Animal rights activists would push strongly for various forms of protective measures on ants, and also plausibly use the moment to argue that the same might be true of other ants; or just generally leverage to increased sympathy(?) to push other agendas.
• 15 Could ant colonies be used for storage of information? How effective would that be?
• 16 Some companies might try to build ant colony APIs like the GPT3 API
• 17 It becomes much harder for humans to protect ant desirable foods; and so ant-poison-laced-protective-fridges, and more, are invented.
• 18 For ant colonies to become part of society they would need some sort of property rights, and ability to e.g. own money. It is unclear how these would be enforced.
• 19 Colonies would compose ant music.
• 20 Would colonies try to obtain faster means of transportation? What could that be? Unlike human hands, it's hard for them to interface with the world in that way...
• 21 Some scheming humans would try to form alliances with the ants to gain power together, drawing upon the ant intelligence in exchange for human mobility and ability to interface with tools.
• 22 Scientists looking into how ants can do so much computation with so few ants compared to neurons in the human brain.
• 23 Books and movies about ant<>human romance (or conflict, discrimination, etc)??
• What are ants like, what characterises them...
  • Distributed
  • Lots of tiny things
  • Can carry heavy loads
  • Energy efficient
• 24 Apparently there's a million billion ants in the world. So it seems that if colonies could successfully combine there would be enough of them lying around that they could achieve a decisive strategic advantage over humans.
• 25 AI safety folks trying to initiate anti-combining measures. They have the advantage of being able to move faster and having more advanced tools than ants. Can start by mapping known colonies across the world.
• 26 Then moving to sealing off abilities for them to connect. Maybe running long underground walls of ant-poison through key potential connection points between colonies.
• 27 Creating an ant virus that causes infertility and spreading it across the population.
• 28 If the ant colony could do science, it might try to do science and figure out how it works itself.
• 29 Armed with that knowledge, it might initiate selective breeding, and try to change itself in a particular direction, maybe to be faster, smaller, less vulnerable to standard ant poison, or something else.
• 30 Some country declares a "war on ants" after being alerted to the dangers.
• 31 Would there be any attempts at aligning ant colonies? What on earth would that even look like? A big recursive Paul Christiano scheme of interlocking colonies...?
• 32 Maybe as an attack, ants would cut houses off from the internet and/or electricity? For wifi they could maybe form a physical barrier surrounding the receiver (not sure it would work), or they could just chew through cables
• 33 Another attack might be sacrificing parts of the colony to clog up water pipes. Or, they don't even need to sacrifice parts, they could just find stuff elsewhere and then carry it to the pipe and fill it up with it.
• 34 Ant colonies start to mostly operate during the night, hidden in the darkness.
• 35 Humans might create a mutation which is fluorescent, but also really desirable to mate with for other ants. (Locally they're not intelligent, so humans might be able to exploit Moloch-style dynamics.) It now gets much harder for ants to hide.
• 36 Ant colonies might stage some pretty gruesome attacks on humans (cue ant horror movie clips), in order to instill fear in the population.
• 37 Since ants can carry loads much heavier than their own bodyweight, they might try to make money through freight or delivery services.
• 38 Ants might pretend to cooperate with humans, in order to e.g. get a meeting with the president, but in secret ants are cooperating with human bioterrorists who have built a virus that's transmissible through ants to humans.
• 39 If a country declares war on ants, small ant Guerilla groups might crop up, and locally take a bunch of rural houses/people hostage.
• 40 Are there optimal temperatures for ants? If there is, maybe that could be leveraged as a defense mechanism by humans?
• 41 Ants try to smuggle themselves onboard starlink satellite launch, in order to intercept and replace broadcasts with subtle ant propaganda
• 42 If the ant colony does its computation via individual ants following strong pheromones (heard that somewhere, no clue if it's right), then humans might try to place super strong/confusing odours as a means to mess up those signals.
• 43 Humans might try to create tiny ant robots that are sufficiently-persuasive-super-stimuli to local ants to destabilise the computation as a whole.
• 44 Ant colonies might specialise in obtaining and selling intelligence; e.g. by sneaking into houses and spying on inhabitants.
• 45 Ants might seek to make their way into nuclear power plants or nuclear weapon storage facilities, take over them, and then blackmail humans.
• 46 How fast do ants reproduce? One early strategy might to just go to an airport, send a few hundred ones one different planes -- small enough that no one would really notice -- and start offspring colonies in other locations in the world.
• 47 It seems one of the major bottlenecks on ant communcation is transmission of information, which either occurs at ant walking speed or pheromone transmission speed. So ants make seek ways of communicating via fiber optics. If they can already simulate a human at current information transmission constraints, that might just be enough to make them superintelligent.
• 48 Ant colonies might attempt to destabilise ant poison supply chain... though maybe ant poison is really easy to make and this would be too hard?
• 49 Human cities might install super loud anti ant-noises from public loudspeakers, that are still outside the hearing range of humans.
• 50 Some organisations try to negotiate a peace treaty between ants and humans.

 1) Destroying ant colonies becomes a criminal offence in many countries.

2) Some countries launch a campaign to exterminate the perceived threat.

3) There is a large outbreak of online conspiracy theories asserting that this is proof of the existence of aliens/Gods.

4) The person(s) who discovered ant colonies are intelligent becomes very famous and wins a lot of prizes.

5) Building things becomes more expensive due to the need to conduct surveys to ensure that no ant colonies are disturbed.

6) Special reservations are created where ant colonies can live free of human interference.

7) Computer games where you play as a simulated ant gain in popularity.

8) The UN tries to organise peace talks between warring ant colonies.

9) A large number of stories are written involving intelligent ant colonies.

10) A society for the promotion of the welfare of ants is formed

11) A lot of scientific research is diverted into trying to understand why ants colonies are intelligent, and how to communicate with them.

12) Companies that try to trade with ants lose money as it turns out that we don't have much they want.

13) A lot of people refuse to believe that ant colonies are intelligent, and go on anti-ant protests claiming it is all a conspiracy.

14) The SETI program gets a large infusion of cash to hunt for other intelligences out there.

15) Intelligent ant colonies are able to grow faster, and go onto devastate many ecosystems.

16) Toy ants become one of the best selling toys.

17) Documentaries/non fiction books about ants become more popular.

18) A lot of people think 'Oh that's interesting' - and then continue doing exactly what they would have done anyway.

19) Special jails have to be built to hold ant colonies that kill people.

20) It becomes illegal to keep ants as pets.

21) A movie with a totally unrealistic depiction of an ant colony as a hero wins the oscars.

22) It inspires a single love 'Love our Ants' which tops the charts for a record period of time.

23) A statue of an ant is put on the fourth plinth of Trafalgar square

24) Vegetarianism becomes more popular as some people start thinking other animals might also be intelligent.

25) Politicians make boring speeches about what this means about our place in the world, which are mostly ignored.

26) The US military gets a multi billion dollar budget for anti-ant super weapons, and the project goes hopelessly over budget.

27) Ant colonies become a convenient scapegoat for things like global warming.

28) It becomes illegal to keep ants as pets.

29) Ant colonies are given the vote in elections.

30) Ant colonies win an election as they outnumber the humans.

31) Ant colonies begin re-arranging the world to suit them.

32) There are a large number of anti-ant government protests.

33) Ant colonies decide that humans are an environmental menace and should be wiped out for the good of the rest of planet.

34) Ant colonies are able to use there numerical advantage to wipe the humans out.

35) Humans are able to use their advanced technology to make large ant colonies extinct.

36) Ants become temporarily the most googled keyword

37) Ant colonies inspire novel attempts to create AIs based on them.

38) Relations between different groups of humans becomes better as their differences looks small compared to their differences with ants.

39) People refuse to believe that ant colonies could be intelligent. It undermines trust in science, which is used by various special interest groups to undermine the scientific case whenever it is in their interests.

40) The number of people in prison increases as a lot of people are arrested for killing ants.

41) Fears that governments will ban pesticides that kill ants lead to people panic buying anti-ant pesticides.

42) Governments ban pesticides that could kill ants.

43) Reduced pesticide use leads to a drop in global food production.

44) Lack of food causes riots in several developing countries.

45) More people die of hunger.

46) Countries go to war over the lack of food.

47) School children are required to learn about ant colonies in school.

48) A campaign is launched to wipe out predators that could destroy ant colonies.

49) Zoos are no longer allowed to have ant colonies.

50) Zoos are no longer allowed to feed ants to their animals.

1. I will become famous by telling the world this news
2. I can probably get a professor job off the back of this research
3. The open question of why they became intelligent will lead to alien conspiracy theories
4. Religions will claim that God must have done this
5. Some people will say this is proof we are in a simulation
6. New businesses will start up to exploit the intelligent ants
7. Interfaces will be built to communicate with the ants
8. Some people will say it is a conspiracy theory and the ants aren’t really smart
9. The research will lead to advances in swarm computing
10. I’ll doubt my research and have to check it over again
11. We will need to make peace with ant kind - they would win in a war
12. Ant kind will start communicating with each other and making their own culture
13. Governments might try and stop the ants from communicating
14. Some people will ally with the ants, running secret anthills
15. Someone will develop a way for ants to access the internet
16. Will the ants have emotions?
17. New religions will form that incorporate ant and human kind
18. We can send ant colonies in spaceships more easily than people
19. Ant colony pilots
20. Ants will take over some areas of the economy that they are suited to
21. People will protest about ants taking their jobs
22. We can send GM ant colonies to Mars and other planets
23. We can use ants to spy on people
24. Eating ants will become a weird fetish for some people
25. Anti-ant areas will be setup with strict regulations to prevent ants from getting in
26. Governments will suspect each other of creating the intelligent ants
27. Ant colonies will start to work together, creating mega-colonies
28. The entire Amazon will become a giant ant hive mind
29. There will be peace accords between different species of ants
30. People will investigate if bees and other hive type species are also intelligent
31. There will be an ant made novel
32. Studying ants will lead to leaps forward in AI
33. Someone will run an ant Turing test
34. Adam Ant will have a pop revival
35. Some people will deify the ants and live by their dictates
36. Some ant colonies will become particularly famous
37. It will become fashionable to have an ant colony companion in your home
38. Artists will collaborate with ants to generate intricate 3d sculptures
39. The first ant politician will be elected
40. There will be a human ant war
41. Some people will move to cold places that have less ants
42. Alex Jones will invent some conspiracy theory about ants
43. The ant news will be drowned out by the US election
44. There will be films made about ant kind
45. There will be human-ant romances
46. People will develop pheromone sprays to influence the ants
47. Some ant hives will become addicted to pheromone sprays
48. The bill of human rights will be extended to include ant rights
49. Studying ant hives will lead to advances in neuroscience
50. Whole new university departments will be created to study ants

1. PETA suddenly gains a larger following.
2. AI researchers develop human-brain models based on ant signaling, which maybe is less complex than the human brain?
3. Public intellectuals debate whether an ant colony is smarter than a human based on emphasizing different aspects of how the intelligence emerges.
4. Philosophy departments at universities go from borderline irrelevant to somewhat less irrelevant; however, none of the thorny philosophy questions about intelligence/personhood become any easier.
5. Charles Murray calculates that the average ant colony is smarter than the average Black person.
6. The debate over whether Murray’s calculations are accurate generates, within five years, more published articles than The Bell Curve has generated to date.
7. Rule 34 has a number of implications here.  First is that there will be CGI porn of someone having sex with an ant colony.
8. The next step is that the teledildonics industry develops increasingly complex ways of allowing a human to have sex with an ant colony, witht the first methods totally stupid, but improving over time.
9. The next step is that a human falls in love with an ant colony. This person writes a personal essay that The New Yorker publishes.
10. Colonies can make a lot of money doing sex work.
11. If language learning is on average equally available to human-level intelligence, ie there’s nothing unique about human intelligence vis a vis language learning (I don’t know enough), ant colonies learn to communicate with humans through (spelling out words with ant bodies? pheromones?
12. A ten-year-old-equivalent ant colony works with a {handwave to insert computer genius} to come up with a relatively easy way for ant colonies to type.
13. Once an ant colony can type, it is trivially easy for the colony to coordinate with other colonies.
14. Ant colonies also start doing AI safety research.
15. I’m very worried about conservative Christians in this scenario.  God gave you dominion over all the creatures, but an ant colony is as smart as you.  Do you throw out your ant poison? Or buy more and start murdering? (You wouldn’t consider it murder. Or would you?)
16. The Catholic Church announces that ant colonies have souls.  Many consequences arise from this.
17. The Southern Baptist Convention announces that ant colonies do NOT have souls.  Many consequences arise from this.
18. Ants are indifferent except for instrumentalist reasons, because their brain-equivalent doesn’t have the specific part of the human brain responsible for the perception of a “higher power”.
19. People who don’t think the colonies are human-equivalent say “How do we even know what it’s like for an ant colony? We don’t know if there’s something going on under the hood, maybe the intelligence is just emergent phenomena” and I say “Hah, you’ve fallen for a Socratic trap. How do you know there’s something going on under my hood?”  The ant colony situation does not assist philosophers with this question.  My interlocutor determines that I’m a philosophical zombie and tries to murder me.
20. The colonies develop ant political parties; or
21. The colonies’ intelligence is such a way that they are all unified on whatever question they consider; or
22. The colonies are not unified but have an anty knack for solving coordination problems and out-coordinate humans; or
23. The colonies are not unified, have anty knack, but end up supporting existing political parties because it’s the best coordination case for them at the time
24. Ant queens have conferences where they get together and communicate by pheromone, much easier than doing it using ICQ
25. The Great American Ant Novel is published and gets a starred review in Kirkus.
26. There is massive variation in how various governments treat the issue.  Strongmen outgroup them even harder than they outgroup ethnic minorities.
27. More liberalish states/governments give sentient colonies the franchise.  However, they impose intelligence tests that so happen to mean there aren’t enough voting colonies to affect human politics--at first
28. Ants quickly realize that in order to survive, they need a deterrent military force.  They are small, and slow, but they are legion.  Russia supplies computer-operated drone and remote weapon systems to Ukrainian colonies, which are willing to lob a rocket at western Ukraine sometimes in exchange for top cover from Putin.
29. There are anti-ant pogroms in parts of the U.S.A.  I’m not confident enough to predict where they are.
30. Colonies develop the intellectual symptoms of severe anxiety due to feeling under constant threat.
31. A colony writes a sci-fi novel about a human suddenly waking up one day and being as intelligent as an ant colony.
32. Scarlett Johansson starts in a movie about a woman-looking ant colony that picks up men on the side of the road in Great Britain and then eats them.
33. It becomes taboo to ask someone online if they are a colony or not.
34. Corollary: sometimes you ask for nudes, and you get...a picture of a writhing mass of ants.
35. Colony hipsters reject online communication with other ants and instead hitch rides with sympathetic humans to go hang out with a nearby or far-flung colony, like an exchange program.
36. Every ant colony is surrounded by webcams broadcasting to Facebook Live so they can surveill people who may be about to poison them.
37. Inconvenient colonies agree to be relocated in exchange for the reasonable value of the property they inhabit.
38. If the president is a Democrat, there is created a cabinet-level post for anty stuff.
39. The next Republican president does away with it (cf. Carter’s solar panels on the White House roof).
40. Humanist political parties arise, but it’s not humanist like secular humanist but rather like human-supremacist, and that use of “humanist” outcompetes the “secular humanist” use into oblivion. At least 20% of the American population would support wiping out all ants capable of forming sentient colonies.
41. Some states make it murder to destroy a sentient colony, but there’s a lot of jury nullification, and each side hires expert witnesses to say that the victim was or wasn’t intelligent enough to be sentient.
42. A colony manages to kill an inept human assailant and is tried for murder.  Before the trial can proceed, someone sets it on fire and destroys it.  The prosecutor declines to bring charges.
43. One colony develops a standup comedy routine that absolutely slays at rationalist conventions, primarily riffs involving the word “signaling”
44. Colonies are difficult to do research on because they almost all determine that teaching humans how they think is too dangerous.  Humans need a big skull bottle you can make holes in to great effect if you have a drone rifle.  Anty brains are much harder to destroy.
45. One colony tells the literal truth and participates in all studies in good faith, but the information on it gets lost in the noise.
46. Dogs, on average, are found to be far more loyal to colony owners than human owners.
47. Eventually, things get weird enough that the anty teledildonic industry comes up with a way to turn human-generated sex stuff into ant sensations.
48. Colonies outperform humans at chess at a rate much higher than projected.  An emergent property of colony brains responsible for strategic thinking is suspected.
49. Colonies coordinate on their own to wipe out fire ants--turns out nobody likes those guys.
50. The U.S. elects its first colony president about 200 years after the colonies become intelligent. :::