The Perfect Space Opera

I put "Um...ants can't screw in lightbulbs???", but I think that if they were given direction and had the capacity to understand such direction, they could probably do it. I just don't know how many it would take.

The AI one stumped me. I had never really thought about it. I think that an AI could hypothetically get pretty close to sentience, to the point of achieving it, but I do not know, or what the implications of that would be. It might be that it could simulate certain aspects of sentience, to the point that living beings perceived it as sentient, but it wasn't actually sentient itself.

I do believe in souls. (I am religious, see my signature.) I don't know if a sentient AI would have a soul, though.

Good questions! They made me think.

The ants one depends on context, is the socket in the ceiling or on the ground, because that changes a lot. However, I am certain they could do it, I've seen a video of two wasps opening a bottle by twisting the cap, and ants building bridges out of their bodies. They could totally screw a bulb in if they had enough ants.

Do I believe AI could ever become Sapient? Not even close, nothing we have seen from them has ever even approached contious thought. No computer will ever ask itself the question "Who am I? Why am I here?"

10 hours ago, Frustration said:

Do I believe AI could ever become Sapient? Not even close, nothing we have seen from them has ever even approached contious thought. No computer will ever ask itself the question "Who am I? Why am I here?"

I finally found someone who agrees with me on this. I think one big difference, as highlighted in "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" is empathy, and true emotion in general. I find it very troubling that we as humanity have given citizenship to a cold machine that is completely incapable of feeling sympathy. What happens when said machine gets to make decisions that vastly affect other people?

How big is this lightbulb, how many ants would it take to lift it off the floor, and what kind of ant are we talking about?

I have decided, after a bit of research, that the bulbs weigh 0.075 lbs which is about 34019.4 mg. The ants weigh 6 mg and can carry 10-15 times their weight which means they can carry 60-90 mg of weight. This means it would take somewhere between 378 ants (who can each carry 90 mg) and 567 ants (who can each carry 60 mg).

There's nothing between 100 ants and 100,000 ants. 100 ants couldn't do it. 100,000 would be too many, but - assuming they understood - could probably do it, and there would be lots of sad ants standing around and doing nothing.

Now, these ants are big enough that even three hundred seventy eight ants can't be touching the floor and the lightbulb at the same time, so we'll assume they use pilfered thread or cheesecloth and add more ants for the extra weight, which I don't care about right now. There's enough margin that it's safe to assume that 100,000 ants can deal with the lightbulb and cheesecloth and still have some sad lonely ants sitting around doing nothing.

You're welcome.

An AI cannot have a soul, I think, but it could almost certainly reach sentience given enough time and technology advancement.