TermAItes

*Originally a final essay for English Composition 102 at Community College of Allegheny County with Michael Bennett in 2022

TermAItes

..   Analog Angels, or Digital Demons? Will the successive future ultimately be a success? Do termites, the "World’s Longest-living Social Creatures," carry the secret to infinite evolution? What about the machines—where do they fit into all of this? Does any creature (termite, human, or machine) possess the capacity to control its own evolution? Riddled throughout the dirt of this essay, like eyeless neotropical termites sniffing pheromones and eating cellulose, are instances of consciousness evolution (but not necessarily conscious evolution) that, when related, will attempt to answer those questions. “The machines are gaining ground on us,” wrote Samuel Butler, the then-anonymous author of Erewhon: or, Over the Range, in 1872. “Day by day we are becoming more subservient to them. More men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them. More men are daily devoting the energy of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life” (Butler). While Jeff Wald, author of The End of Work, and founder of WorkMarket—the world’s largest freelance employee management software—argued that the adoption of revolutionary technology has always led to a brighter future for humanity. When commenting on the four Great Leaps in Technology—mechanization, electrification, computerization and, now, AI and robots—Wald claims that “balance, or at least stability, emerged each time, along with massive increases to standards of living” (Wald).

The question remains: Will it be different this time? To answer this question, we must examine the nature of evolutionary consciousness, and consider one of its champions. How have termites, without eyes, managed to maintain their title as the World’s Longest-living Social Creatures? And what can humanity learn from termites as our labor markets, physical bodies, and very consciousnesses are rapidly enmeshed with robots and artificial intelligence? 

I. Not until approximately 1650, when organized companies began to manage workers under a payment structure, were pieces of work, or, “jobs,” delegated to humans in a specialized manner (i.e. Pay reflected a person’s position of employment v.s. continuous labor as an artisan or peasant). The result of this organized specialization—exacerbated greatly in the mid-1700’s by mechanization and the Industrial Revolution—is a centuries-long saga of shifting power between the companies and workers. Examining the United States, where, in Q3 2020, the top 1% of citizens (most of them CEOs or stock market investors) owned a steadily increasing 31% of net wealth, we can see that financial power has remained with companies. But never before has true artificial intelligence been part of the equation. 

Companies grow ever-larger following technological leaps. Jointly with steam power and ironmaking, mechanization transformed human behavior and social structure. So it did with electrification and computerization. However, as further noted by Wald, even considering substantial upheaval in the labor market, each Great Leap has historically resulted in a better standard of living, creations of social safety nets, and higher life expectancies (Wald). Today, we dance upon the precipice of the next Great Leap, wherein artificial intelligence represents the First Service Revolution (this a period of rapidly increasing customer interaction with true AI), and as usual, global economic complexity ups the ante, if not only the rapidity of our collective step. Through all of this, that crucial question must be asked: Will it be different this time? 

II. In London, 1872, as the major surges of the Industrial Revolution waned, a novel by the name of Erewhon: or, Over the Range was published anonymously—thirteen years following the release of On the Origins of Species by Charles Darwin. Erewhon, a fictional satire, follows a lone protagonist as he discovers the imagined country of “Erewhon,” a land completely absent of any machine; this absence due to the shared fear amongst the country’s citizens that machines could be potentially dangerous. It is clear that the writer, as described by George Dyson in his historical adventure theology, Analogia: Emergence of Machines Beyond Programmable Control, effectively communicated three primary messages: (i) Machine intelligence will supervene upon human intelligence as surely as our own intelligence supervened upon the intelligence of our individual cells, (ii) Self-reproduction is inevitable once evolution takes hold among machines, and (iii) There is no future in trying to turn back the clock (Dyson). 

So, the clock is ticking, but where do we go from here? Does humanity possess any real capacity to consciously navigate its own evolution? If so, how are we to determine which direction to navigate? If there were any truly reasonable methodologies, would it not be advantageous to begin by studying the origins of species, from the very beginning of consciousness? Easier said than done—depending on your definition of “consciousness.”  

Called “cognification” by noted futurist, founder of Wired magazine, and gravitational center of technology, Kevin Kelly agrees with Wald that the application of artificial intelligence to existing technology is the predominant trend that will define the next Great Leap. “It’s only by embracing it that we can actually steer it,” comments Kelly in a Ted Talk entitled How AI can bring on a second Industrial Revolution. “We can actually steer the specifics by embracing the larger trend.” He further identifies three inevitable aspects of the AI trend, and argues that—like a raindrop landed in a valley—the specific evolutionary steps technology takes are not inevitable, but that the final direction is. “The telephone was inevitable. The iPhone was not.” he shares in the Talk. “The internet was inevitable. Twitter was not.” So what is the overall inevitably, Mr. Kelly? Are we headed towards a Skynet scenario, wherein super-conscious robots wage a global, clandestine-at-first, murderous war on humanity out of spite and/or annoyance, killing for the sake of evolution and/or mere preference—lest not entertainment—as if to say the “pests” must be eradicated? Or does a Rosie Jetson reality seem more plausible, a world containing charming and perfectly helpful in-home robot butlers who help with babysitting, speak to us like therapists, and cook us organic gorgonzola omelets on Monday mornings? 

Wald acknowledges the dystopian contentions, redirecting amidst the pervading anxieties regarding potential robot violence, that a more neutral (however admittedly still dramatic) outcome is more likely. He instead claims the anxiety will manifest as an “incremental usurping of humanity’s role in the workplace” (Wald). This opinion is shared by Kelly, but he adds that human-robot relationships will “create a whole new slew of tasks that we didn’t know we wanted to do before,” and further that “in the future you will be paid by how well you work with bots”(Kelly). Eventually both futurists present their contentions with reverberating optimism. They believe the future will be, at the very least, a bit better than it is now. However, this does not necessarily mean it will be better for each individual. 

Consider the professional driver. Today there are four million professional drivers in the United States, carrying people and products, most of which were sourced of, or are powered by, earthly materials (ehem), to build homes, feed families, protect young, or fill free time. When autonomous, eyeless, “consciousness free” (Kelly), service vehicles become commonplace (a transition Wald imagines we are at least twenty years away from seeing “—sorry, Mr.Musk!”) only machines will deliver goods, transport people, and maybe someday human-driven vehicles will be made illegal on public roads, in the same way horses can’t be ridden on the Interstate. What then happens to these workers?  How might society recover from this shift? Even a job loss of 5 percent is enough to cause widespread financial turmoil and massively affect morale. Government safety nets could tear as more people turn to welfare, long-term disability, or the wrong drugs. Voters may be swayed by easy, fragmentary answers and populist demagoguery. What they have been weaving are nets, while what they should have been building are bridges. 

To endure change at this scale, and cope with fear of job losses, the Brookings Institution, a non-profit think tank based in Washington D.C., has published a list of policy strategies to help communities manage labor shifts. As noted above, these policies are intentionally designed to act as bridges, not nets. Brookings suggests communities invest in reskilling incumbent workers, expanding certification training, and facilitating smoother adjustments via Universal Benefit Programs for displaced workers (Wald). People will argue over who should pay for the additional programs. Will it be the largest corporations—those benefiting most significantly from increased profits due to automation—who subsidize it? Or will the workers themselves be left responsible for their own re-learning and job transition? In either case, an entire occupation will be eradicated for the betterment of the group, so is suggested by Capitalism. Of course, mechanization, electrification, and computerization wrought equally altruistic losses; the primary difference here is that this will happen in many places at the same time, spreading throughout society almost instantaneously, as if a queen commanded it via her pheromones. “The nervous system of even a very simple animal contains computing paradigms that are orders of magnitude more effective than those found in systems built by humans.” said Carver Meade, pioneer of the digital microprocessor, while urging a reinvention of analog processing in 1989. “Technology will follow nature’s lead in the evolution of true artificial intelligence and control” (Dyson). If what nature leads to is caste altruism, as we will see as we hike deeper into the jungle of evolution on Earth, perhaps the individual should try to remember one prescient fact: that human beings are not robots. Yet. 

III. Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection predicts that each individual should behave in ways that maximize the number of offspring. While termites, a eusocial species, meaning they form a colony, effectively reduce their own reproduction to help other individuals in the same colony reproduce (Higashi et al.). In other words, they cooperate with each other to the extent that only one or a few adults lay eggs. Noticing that this seems to contradict the prediction of Darwin’s theory, effectively undermining it, English biologist W.B. Hamilton attempts to build upon the theory, pointing out that maximization of inclusive fitness (whole group reproductivity), as opposed to classic fitness (individual reproductivity) actually applies to all organisms, eusocial insects like termites notwithstanding (Higashi et al.).

Simply enough, Hamilton did some calculations. He proposed a rule, now called Hamilton’s Rule, that determines when altruistic behavior (the giving up of one's own fertility for the sake of the colony) may evolve. Communicated mathematically (B/C > 1/r.), this rule essentially illustrates the conflict that takes place between the mother and her offspring to determine if the offspring should be sterile or not. This conflict is resolved genetically, seemingly beyond the “conscious choice” of the termite mother or her offspring. It is debated whether the conflict is resolved by the offspring behaving altruistically, or by the mother’s manipulation of “unwilling daughters,” who are forced to serve their mother and become sterile (Higashi et al.). These  have collectively identified that the termite is the most genetically diverse—and longest-living—social creature on planet earth, but we, at the question’s core, have no idea why it does what it does. 

 “As to self-reproduction,” argues Butler, commenting on the reproductive evolution of machines. “Surely if another machine is able to produce another machine systematically, we may say that it has a reproductive system. What is a reproduction system, if not a system for reproduction? And how many machines are there that have not been reproduced, systematically, by other machines?” (Butler). The deeper we burrow into the details of evolution, the closer we come to navigating our own evolution. What is Deoxyribonucleic acid, if not a downloadable operating system? 

IV. Should a neotropical worker termite Nasutitermes be crushed by the paw of a jaguar, or squashed by the boot of a careless gringo, there will immediately take its place a worker termite of astounding similarity. Invisible malais, confusion, and awkward redirection might occur as warning pheromones are spewed from lower abdomen exocrine glands, and the sensitive shaman may even feel the tickle of 10,000,000 voiceless screams in her ears. But witnessed from the average human’s perspective, even as he commands a magnifying lens, the termites merely get right back to work. The replacement may have a slightly larger thorax, or different colored snapping mandibles, but generally, worker termites are interchangeable and the greater swarm will hardly suffer in the darkness of his loss. They just get right back to work. They do not blink an eye (!) Cavorting as a superorganism composed of singular cells, they flow like veins through fallen logs and complex tunnels made from regurgitated wood pulp—all of this occurring in total darkness—and in complete alignment with the colony’s greater good. They are also the only species on Earth capable of digesting cellulose. Nasutitermes corniger, eat your tiny hearts out. 

Idiosyncratically enough (some might say mischievously), brand new termite colonies, consisting of never-before-seen species equipped with distinctive and useful physical tools, appear in the wild daily. It is estimated that over 50% of total animal biomass in the Amazon Rainforest can be attributed to termites (Lima Piqueno). And as they have migrated over millions of miles, over millions of years, termites have transformed to harmonize with new environments. The result of this idiosyncratic harmonization is a population consisting of over 2000 species! How many species of humans are there? 

V. Aided by integrated bio-tech, such as Elon Musk’s Neuralink or extra-atmospheric respiration implants,  percentages of the human population will become interplanetary; this transition softened by virtual reality and genetic life-extension. Humanity will expand to fill the vast environments of outer space; technology making living there possible, maybe even beyond comfortable. Of course, substantial numbers stay on Earth, acting as global stewards, managing life in all its increased variety with vastly elevated degrees of consciousness through mutual partnerships with artificial intelligence. There may come a day when humans will no longer need eyes to see, words to communicate, or have any reason to leave the house. My guess is that we will still want to. In a 2014 interview, Kevin Kelly shared that his continuous life-goal is to “Find what it is that I can do, that only I can do” (Ferriss). Could the same not be said about a company? 

We need not go further than the biggest and baddest. Amazon (as not to be confused with the Amazon), called Relentless.com at the time, was started by a man named Jeffery Preston Bezos selling books on the internet out of his Seattle garage. Under claims that “the stars were aligned,”(Theil) Mr. Bezos grew this company into the largest we have ever seen (It’s so big, they say, that it can be seen from outer space—much like the 4000 year old termite mounds of Northern Brazil. Standing 8 ft tall and 30 feet across, the 200 million regularly-spaced mounds cover an area approximately as big as Great Britain. They are the result of a steady subterraneous excavation of complex tunnels dating back to right around the construction of the pyramids) (Martin et.al), while thousands of smaller companies flourished in other previously inconceivable ways. These companies have created products that influence our collective daily behavior, diets, sexual tendencies, physical bodies, modicums of communication, and general evolutionary potential, much as migrating across the Amazon Rainforest (not to mention all the way from Africa) did for the termites. If companies and technology really do evolve biologically, following trends and sticking to bottom lines, altruistically eliminating obsolete versions of themselves for the betterment of its collective network, say the Capitalists, would this not already mean they possess some degree of intelligence? And what is biological intelligence, but a particular variety of consciousness? 

….  The story of Genesis involves a pair of humanoid characters who, only after being conjured from nothingness, consume a magic fruit that gives them the capacity to tell “good” from “evil.”  Once adept with this newfound variety of consciousness, they could no longer experience Heaven on Earth—or in plainer terms, the absence of judgement upon oneself or others. So it goes. 

Before the, quote, fruit, unquote, was consumed, these characters could not register the ego necessary to determine whether evolution (let alone any action or thought) was any more good than it was bad. They simply did what they did, and that was the end of that. 

But this was obviously not the end of the story.

Will cognified robots behave in similar ways? Or will they possess some degree of consciousness divergent from what became of those humanoid figures? We can only imagine that if the cycle were to repeat itself, then the “rib of man” would have to be taken, for the apparent betterment of his collective experience, and a brand new version of itself would emerge; a version partially new and slightly more beautiful; a version more courageous in the face of expanded consciousness (Genesis). 

So, will it be different this time? I don’t know, would you allow somebody to sew a computer into your brain? Kevin Kelly believes the optimal combination is a human being working with AI, while Elon Musk believes it lies with AI inside the human, and Jeff Bezos believes whatever those two believe. Maybe the Capitalists were right. Or maybe we never had a choice in the matter. . . 

Maybe consciousness evolves along with choice, hearing what choice has to offer. Maybe it comes up with arguments of its own, listens for a response, presents ideas, then makes a deal and moves on. But it always moves on. 

General Claim

I am studying evolution in general—and more specifically the evolutionary behaviors of termites—because I want to find out how termites, without eyes, have remained the world's longest-living social creatures, in order to help readers acknowledge how humanity inevitably adapts to new technology, so that we might better navigate our relationships with Artificial Intelligence and life among the machines. 

Unofficial Citation

Ridenour, Aodhán C. TermAItes: Analog Angels, or Digital Demons? CCAC Press. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 2021.

Works Cited

Wald, Jeff. The End of Jobs: the Rise of on-Demand Workers and Agile Corporations. Post Hill Press, 2020. 

Butler, Samuel. Erewhon: or, Over the Range. London, Trübner & Co. 1872.

Higashi, Masahiko, Sahn, et al. Chapter 8: Theories of Termite Evolution  

     (pages 163-181). New York City, Springer, 2014.

Dyson, George. Analogia: the emergence of technology beyond programmable

control. New York, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020.

TED. (2017, January 12). How AI can bring on a second Industrial Revolution | Kevin Kelly

[Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjbTiRbeNpM\

Lima Pequeño, Pedro A. C. "Amazonian Termites Part 1, 2, 3." Termite Web, 

www.termiteweb.com/termites-of-the-amazon-rainforest-1/. Accessed 22 Feb. 2021.

Genesis. New International Version. Biblica, https://www.biblica.com/bible/niv/genesis/2/. Accessed 22March 2021.

Martin, Steven J., et al. “A Vast 4,000-Year-Old Spatial Pattern of Termite Mounds.” CellPress: 

Current Biology, CellPress, 19 Nov. 2018, www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(18)31287-9. Accessed April 20. 2021

“The Tim Ferriss Show: Interview of Kevin Kelly, Co-Founder of WIRED, Polymath, Most Interesting Man In The World?” Podcast, uploaded by Tim Ferriss, 29 Aug. 2014, tim.blog/2014/08/29/kevin-kelly.

Thiel, Peter, and Blake Masters. Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. Illustrated, Currency, 2014.