Giant spider robot.?

Question

If you built a large robot spider and on the top had a tiny set of 8 levers, each one controling a leg of the robot, then you glued a real spider to the top so each one of its legs were attached to a lever. Would the spider be clever enough to control the giant spider robot and take over the world? or would it just kind of sit there in protest at being glued to a giant robot?

Answer 1

Spiders have very tiny minds I doubt it would realize that it could move its legs to move the robot. Even if it did move the robot it would assume that the object it was glued to moved, not that she moved it.

Cause and effect takes reasoning. For most creatures they react to what happens they don't plan. For a creature to plan they have to understand the idea of cause and effect. This takes a more complex organism on the order of at least a bird.

For example a mockingbird can mimic a lot of things, even the sounds made by a car. In the wild it uses its mimic ability to defend and protect itself. It can issue a call that will drive off another bird or animal. It understands cause and effect. It knows that if it makes this kind of call and not a different call then something will happen.

When ant scouts are sent out to find food they check probably paths and lay down scent trails. When an ant finds food it goes back or relays a message back so that other ants will follow. When an ant doesn't find food it will relay that message as well. When an ant fails to return the colony will know not to use that route, but they won't have the intelligence to reason out why, nor do they care.

A spider that spins a web moves to grab an insect when the insect gets caught in the web. This is a reaction, and only a reaction. The spider knows that it has to make the web to catch the insect, and its instincts tell it that if the web shakes it has scored a capture. It doesn’t realize that make the connection between cause and effect very easily, it doesn't have to it has instincts.

In areas that pertain to the spider, like its food type or it's web it can use its instincts to mimic thought. But, when you get outside of its instincts like with your spider it has no way of dealing with it.

Besides if you created the spider robot you propose then a movement will be too much for it to understand that it was responsible for. It never made such a large movement before that is outside of its instincts so it won't understand that its movement of its leg caused the movement of the robot spider's leg.

Of course people said that gold fish have a 2 minute memory and the Mythbusters proved that was false by training some gold fish and having them perform the trick the next day; however most animals rely on instinct; even a creature as complex as a dog has the pack instinct and that is the major factor that determines its behavior. You are expecting an insect to reason. If you tried this trick with a higher order of animal, say a gecko then it might be able to figure out cause and effect after a few false starts. More likely it will try to move its legs and just fall down, failing to understand that it needs to coordinate those leg movements to generate BALANCE and movement. For this reason you would need something more intelligent like a mammal to understand how to walk with your robot.