Now let us learn from the ants

One of the things that fascinates me about complex systems is that the most successful ones seem to be the ones with the simplest rules. I.e. systems that self-organize around a few key principles in a chaotic environment – thousands of micro-decisions adapted to ultra-local conditions making up an unintentionally unified whole. There’s been some fascinating artificial intelligence research on this for some time at MIT under the rubric of “artificial life,” where small robots navigate their environment by trial and error. WNYC’s RadioLab took a more recent swipe at the concept of self-organization here. (You owe it to yourself to check out RadioLab anyway.)

I think the key to the whole thing may be the parallel processing nature of the enterprise – “distributed intelligence,” I think is the term. For a process to be successful, it has to be dynamic and flexible. The invisible hand is the most-cited version on the economic front, but there are echoes in things as diverse as the biology of neurons to congestion-avoidance in traffic patterns. For the timid beginnings of how to apply the lessons economists have known for centuries to the building of the city try Virginia Postrel on Dynamic Cities. My favorite example is the ill-fated Bolshevik takeover of the Russian economy – specifically the failure of Leninism in its pure form and the forced transition to the New Economic Policy of 1921. Who, indeed, is in charge of supplying the city of London with bread?

But how to plan for the chaotic? Maybe Hayek knew . . . .