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The Age After Wealth

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The Age After Wealth   Background: Social Institutions evolve in response to new technology. The automobile spawned — among other things —traffic lights and laws governing driving behavior. Radio gave rise to laws regulating the electromagnetic spectrum. All in the pursuit of coordinated action for the “common good”.  But the rapid evolution of technology has outpaced the ability of Social Institutions to evolve accordingly.  Moreover, laws and Social institutions are crafted on various economic ideas, on economic models. Both Socialism and Capitalism are pathways that do not appear to be creating Social Institutions which are helping us achieve the greatest common good. This is a story about daily life in a Society that could potentially evolve from economic ideas based on Individualism. ********   Thinking about what to order for breakfast, Maxwell (Max to his friends) eye-scrolled the on-line delivery menu projected on his wall [1].  Just as he was about to choose, he was
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The Termites and the Pendulum

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  The Termites and the Pendulum  1   It is well known that termites display adaptive social behavior under varying environmental conditions. Different types of individuals (i.e., castes) show distinctive phenotypes specialized in specific colony tasks. The whole colony is coordinated by interactions among colony members. 2   New unpublished work suggests greater complexity in the termite caste system, greater communications abilities, as well as greater termite intelligence than previously assumed. This new work is summarized below.   Worldwide there are about 3000 species of termites including about 360 species living in Australia. The new subterranean species, not yet named, was found living on a great wood--mud ball suspended on a 100 foot termite built vine anchored to the top of a cave in New South Wales. When initially discovered the ball was swinging along an orbit with a periodic length of about 7 feet.   Building upon the work of bacteriologists 3 , the investigators d
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Stigmergy

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Yesterday, while reading a paper describing the evolution of certain networks, I stumbled upon this strange word: "Stigmergy". What to do? After a few minutes of web-crawling I learned it was used by the French biologist Pierre-Paul Grassé in 1959 to refer to certain aspects of termite behavior. It is now generally used to refer to a type of communication in which individuals (bacteria, ants, termites, people and other autonomous agents) communicate with one another by modifying their local environemnt. This blog is an example of stigmergy...
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