[Eliezer]

This is an excellent analogy! "Ants can carry fifty times their own weight. Why would humans wipe out the ants on a construction site instead of using food rewards to train them to help remove dirt?" Answer: backhoes are faster at moving dirt, the time lost by carefully moving the ant colony exceeds any gain from their helping to move the dirt on one tiny section of the project, ants are hard to trade with and you wouldn't be sure they were doing the job right, and humans don't have a terminal value for protecting the ants.

And that's without a button that disassembles the ants and uses their atoms to build part of a diamondoid backhoe that's much better at moving dirt.