Insect Intelligence
In the novel Kill Decision, artificially intelligent military drones are programmed on the basis of weaver ants, who communicate with each other to achieve complex predatory actions, and secure their territory. Termites are less violent but are similarly creative and inspirational. In his book Insect Media, Jussi Parikka shows us that media technologies and insect intelligence/behaviour mirror each other, blurring notions of ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’. The philosopher Amia Srinivasan writes: “…individual termites are not particularly intelligent, lacking memory and the ability to learn. Put a few termites into a petri dish and they wander around aimlessly; put in forty and they start stampeding around the dish’s perimeter like a herd. But put enough termites together, in the right conditions, and they will build you a cathedral.” In this example of stigmergy, distributed coordination results in self-organised behaviour without any outside or top-down programming. This ‘swarm intelligence’ is common in insects and is already being applied to the programming of robots: TERMES (video) are termite behaviour-inspired robots.