“their knack for engineering and social coordination can be downright spooky-particularly because none of the individual ants is actually in ‘charge’ of the overall operation”
“it’s this connection between micro and macro organisation that got deborah gordon into ants in the first place. ‘i was interested in systems where individuals who are unable to assess the global situation still work together in a coordiniated way,’ she says now. ‘and they manage to do it using only local information’…”the individual agents in the system pay attention to their immediate neighbours rather than wait for orders from above. They think locally and act locally, but their collective action produces global behaviour”
-Social networks and presence updates are like this, we constantly think out loud and others can tune in-publish/subscribe(connect/convere) enables an ambient awareness”
