bees

Given enough video of swarming bees, for example, researchers might devise a statistical model that allows them to predict what the bees might do next.

It wouldn't matter even if the bees could only survive lower temperatures than the hornet -- bees are expendable if it allows the hive to survive.

Often the thermostats are in sun-facing offices, and the worker bees are in a windowless open plan cave.

The reality of an agency model is that to scale revenue you have to hire more worker bees.

But in Chomsky’s opinion it doesn’t impart any true understanding of why the bees dance in the way that they do.

Consider this analogy, if you don't know anything about bees and see a swarm on your tree branch, do you go apeshit and start screaming and swinging at the bees with a stick?

Amazing how quick the honey bees respond in unison to attack the hornet.

There are also solitary bees that don't form hives and are important pollinators.

Even worker-bees hired for a particular task are understanding their role and often more important than the management layer hired to shield them from the founders.

With bees, the only creature that should be regarded as having any degree of agency is the queen, and all others are to be regarded as appendages.

> The reality of an agency model is that to scale revenue you have to hire more worker bees.

It's an instinctive reaction, deeply ingrained in the surviving lineage of the bees that react like that, because all of the others were culled against, and eaten voraciously.

As eusocial creatures, the bees don't precisely "learn" this sort of thing, or pass information on by "teaching" other bees to coordinate this sort of behavior.

Consciousness is an appearance, same as when an external observer sees an "intelligence" in behavior of a whole colony if bees or ants or, which requires special tools, bacteria.

If you accept that many-celled organisms can be conscious, and that eusocial colonies (ants, bees) behave more like intelligent organisms than any one member, it's not much if a stretch to say "hm, a country belongs on that scale".

If you're bringing bankers or investors or other external parties through, what is more "impressive": A floor full of hard working bees, a buzz of energy filling the air, whiteboards full of complex diagrams (that probably haven't been erased in months if not years) and quirky and crazy "personalizations" on all of the desks, or walking down a hall of quiet closed doors.

Bees would have presumably just hit on this maths during evolution of their neural structures, rather than during time spent staring at a chalkboard.