Deborah Gordon is a Professor of Biology at Stanford University studying the evolution of collective behavior using ant colonies as a model. Her research focuses on how ant colonies regulate their behavior in response to environmental changes, and how collective behavior is related to ecology. This work is highly relevant given the nature of swarms/emergent behavior and possibly holds valuable insights into other species or humanity relating to current changes in climate.
She is also a partner in the “Ants in Space” project designed to learn more about how ants search and coordinate, information that may be useful in designing robot search algorithms and possibly colonizing extraterrestrial bodies like Mars, the Moon or other planetary objects.
Deborah’s the author of Ants at Work and has given two well-received talks at TED in 2003 and 2014 on the ingenious intelligence of ants and swarms which each received 1M+ views to date
In our wide-ranging conversation, we cover many things, including:
The emergent intelligence of ants and what humanity can learn from it
Why intelligence isn’t always clean and is usually simple
How ant colonies help AI researchers program robots
What we can learn from ants about expansion into space
Why ants’ utilitarian society is so effective yet also inefficient
The system of task allocation that allows all ants to contribute
How to solve complex problems with simple incentives
Deborah’s thoughts on blockchain and decentralization
How researchers use ants to think about neuroscience and the brain
We’re headed towards a utilitarian system and why it may not work
Why we’re probably going about building AGI all wrong
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Deborah Gordon is a Professor of Biology at Stanford University studying the evolution of collective behavior using ant colonies as a model. Her research focuses on how ant colonies regulate their behavior in response to environmental changes, and how collective behavior is related to ecology. This work is highly relevant given the nature of swarms/emergent behavior and possibly holds valuable insights into other species or humanity relating to current changes in climate.
