The city of Ants

Ant’s brain contains 5 x10⁵ neurons. This would be fairly a high number if it was your bank account in Euros – or for the time being in Dollars. However, compared to human’s brain 10¹¹ neurons, this wouldn’t make a chance for the ant to beat a newborn at chess.

Ant’s communication capabilities are somewhat sophisticated considering their size. But they would not bear any comparison with our speech exclusive attribute and our ever expanding electronic wiring. Their semantic domain is extremely restricted. Ants have no architects, no means to draft plans, they don’t even know what is a straight line. Ants’ behavioural diversity limited to few basic algorithms their and their strictly limited memory make them quite predictable individually. Now look at this video.

This absolutely unbelievable construction is clearly the result of a non- insignificant collective intelligence. We are highly sophisticated biological organisms with extremely powerful communication capabilities and media. Comparing us with ants seems non-sense.

Yet we don’t seem to achieve the many magnitude orders performance compared to ants... Our vertiginous collective intelligence potential is obviously impeded somewhere...

My guess: High individual intelligence and sophisticated interactions open the doors to selfishness and misinformation. Basically, we react individually based on complex situation analysis based on a subjective (incorrect) perception of facts, altering collective intelligence smartness addressing the wrong issues.