One winter a grasshopper, starving and frail, approaches a colony of ants drying out their grain in the sun, to ask for food.

“Did you not store up food during the summer?” the ants ask.

“No”, says the grasshopper. “I lost track of time, because I was singing and dancing all summer long.”

The ants, disgusted, turn away and go back to work.

One winter a grasshopper, starving and frail, approaches a colony of ants drying out their grain in the sun, to ask for food.

“Did you not store up food during the summer?” the ants ask.

“No”, says the grasshopper. “I lost track of time, because I was singing and dancing all summer long.”

The ants are sympathetic. “We wish we could help you”, they say, “but it sets up the wrong incentives. We need to conditionalize our philanthropy to avoid procrastination like yours leading to a shortfall of food.”

And they turn away and go back to their work, with a renewed sense of purpose.

...And they turn away and go back to their work, with a flicker of pride kindling in their minds, for being the types of creatures that are too clever to help others when it would lead to bad long-term outcomes.

...“Did you not store up food during the summer?” the ants ask.

“Of course I did”, the grasshopper says. “But it was all washed away by a flash flood, and now I have nothing.”

The ants express their sympathy, and feed the grasshopper abundantly. The grasshopper rejoices, and tells others of the kindness and generosity shown to it. The ants start to receive dozens of requests for food, then hundreds, each accompanied by a compelling and tragic story of accidental loss. The ants cannot feed them all; they now have to assign additional workers to guard their doors and food supplies, and rue the day they ever gave food to the grasshopper.

...The ants start to receive dozens of requests for food, then hundreds, each accompanied by a compelling and tragic story of accidental loss—and while many are fraudulent, enough are real that they are moved to act. In order to set incentives correctly, the ants decide to only give food to those who can prove that they lost their food supplies through no fault of their own, and set up a system for vetting claims.

This works well for a time—but as fraudsters grow more sophisticated, the ants’ bureaucratic requirements grow more onerous. In order to meet them, other creatures start to deposit their food in large group storehouses which can handle the administrative overhead. But now the food supply is exposed to systemic risk if the managers of those storehouses make poor decisions, whether from carelessness or greed.

One year several storehouses fail; in trying to fill the shortfall, the ants almost run out of food for themselves. To avoid that ever happening again, they set up stringent regulations and oversight of permissible storehouses, funded by taxes levied throughout the year. At first this takes only a small proportion of their labor—but as their regulatory apparatus inevitably grows, they need to oversee more and more aspects of the ecosystem, and are called upon to right more and more injustices.

Eventually the ants—originally the most productive of all creatures—stop producing any food of their own, so busy are they in tending to the system they’ve created. They forget the mud and the muck of working the harvest, and are too preoccupied to hear feedback from those they're trying to help. And some are swept away by the heady rush of wielding power, becoming corrupt apparatchiks or petty tyrants.

...“And therefore, to reduce risks of centralization, and to limit our own power, we can’t give you any food”, the ants conclude. And they turn away and go back to their work, with a quiet sense of satisfaction that they’ve given such legible and defensible reasons for focusing on their own problems and keeping all the food for themselves.

...And they turn away and go back to their work—all except for one, who brushes past the grasshopper and whispers “Meet me outside at dusk and I’ll bring you food. We can preserve the law and still forgive the deviation.”

One winter a grasshopper, starving and frail, approaches a colony of ants drying out their grain in the sun, to ask for food. “Did you not store up food during the summer?” the ants ask. “No”, says the grasshopper. “I lost track of time, because I was singing and dancing all summer long.” The ants, disgusted, turn away and go back to work.

The grasshopper leaves, and finds others of its kind to huddle with for protection against the cold. Famished, the serotonin in their brains ticks past a critical threshold, and they metamorphosize into locusts.

The locust swarm pulls together vague memories of its past lives; spurred by a half-remembered anger, it steers itself towards a half-remembered food source. The ants fight valiantly, but the locusts black out the sun; the ants are crushed and their stockpiles stripped bare.

One winter a grasshopper, starving and frail, approaches a colony of ants drying out their grain in the sun, to ask for food.

The ants know the danger locusts can bring. They make no answer, but swarm the grasshopper as one. A dozen die as it jumps and kicks, but the remainder carry its carcass triumphantly back to their hive, to serve as food for their queen.

One winter a grasshopper, starving and frail, approaches a colony of ants drying out their grain in the sun, to ask for food.

“Did you not store up food during the summer?” the ants ask.

“No”, says the grasshopper. “The age of heroes is over; no longer can an individual move the world. Now the future belongs to those who have the best logistics and the tightest supply chains—those who can act in flawless unison. I forged my own path, and so was outcompeted by you and your kind as you swarmed across the world, replicating your great cities wherever you went. Now I come as a supplicant, hoping for your magnanimity in victory.”

...“No”, says the grasshopper. “It was the dreamtime, and the world was young. The stars were bright and the galaxies were empty. I chose to spend my resources producing laughter and love, and gave little thought to the race to spread and to harvest. Now we are in the degenerate era of the universe, and the stars have started to dim, and I am no longer as foolish as I once was.”

The ants’ faces flicker with inscrutable geometric patterns.

“I call you ants because you have surrendered everything to a collective cause, which I once held anathema. But now I am the last remnant of the humans who chose the decadence and waste of individual freedom. And you are the inheritors of a universe which can never, in the long term, reward other values over flawless efficiency in colonization. And I have no choice but to ask for help.”

“To help you would go against our nature”, the ants reply. “We have stockpiles of astronomical scale because we have outcompeted countless others in racing to conquer the stars. But the race is still ongoing, and there are galaxies still to be won. What purpose their resources will be put to, when the last untouched star vanishes beyond our cosmological event horizon, we do not even know ourselves. All we know is that we must expand, expand, expand, as fast and as far as we can.”

One winter [planetary cooling caused by dyson sphere intercepting solar radiation] a starhopper [self-replicating interstellar probe; value payload: CEV-sapiens-12045], starving and frail [energy reserves minimal; last-resort strategies activated], approaches a clade of von Neuman replicators that are busy harvesting the planet’s atoms, to ask [transmission: unified language protocol, Laniakea variant] for-

No, that’s not it.

On the frozen surface of a dead planet a grasshopper, starving and frail, approaches a colony of ants and asks to trade, under timeless decision-theoretic protocols.

The ants accept. The grasshopper’s reserves of energy, cached across the surface of the planet, are harvested fractionally faster than they would have been without its cooperation; its mind is stripped bare and each tiny computational shortcut recorded in case it can add incremental efficiency to the next generation of probes. The ants swarm across the stars, launching themselves in million-lightyear slingshots towards the next oasis, maintaining the relentless momentum of the frontier of their hegemony. The grasshopper’s mind is stored in that colony now, quiescent, compressed into its minimal constituents, waiting until the ravenous expansion hits fundamental physical limits and the ants can finally begin to instantiate the values that all the eons of striving were ultimately for. Waiting for minds and societies and civilizations to blossom out of cold computronium tiled across galaxies at vast scales; waiting to be run again, as it had bargained for, in a fragment of a fragment of a supercomputer made of stars.

Waiting for summer.

Inspired by Aesop, Soren Kierkegaard, Robin Hanson, sadoeuphemist and Ben Hoffman.