"Money velocity is a big deal, but only economists talk about it. I'm no economist, but I know what I like. Money velocity measures how many times the average dollar changes hands in a year. The GDP measures all the transactions we do in a year. When we get a dollar, we spend that dollar, which gets measured as a $2 addition to the GDP. If consumers and businesses feel confident, they spend money faster and the GDP goes up and we proclaim ourselves successful, If we hang on to our dollars a little longer, we're less successful. I don't know what the current figures are, but I recall money velocity being about 12-14 times a year when I took my single Econ course. (Obviously, you should look elsewhere for your economic insights.) The calculation is made by dividing the money supply (no simple calculation, that) into the GDP. If money's zinging around the economy at the rate of 1 move per month (12 per year) and it slows by just a day, the GDP drops by 3%, which is a big deal. It gives us an idea why the consumer confidence rating is so important. It's safe to assume that money velocity was higher in 1999 than it is now, and that difference may account for the relative weakness in the economy."

"Human beings suffer from a "centralized mindset"; they would like to assign the coordination of activities to a central command. But the way social insects form highways and other amazing structures such as bridges, chains, nests (by the way, African fungus-growing termites have invented air conditioning) and can perform complex tasks (nest building, defense, cleaning, brood care, foraging, etc) is very different: they self-organize through direct and indirect interactions.

In social insects, errors and randomness are not "bugs"; rather, they contribute very strongly to their success by enabling them to discover and explore in addition to exploiting. Self-organization feeds itself upon errors to provide the colony with flexibility (the colony can adapt to a changing environment) and robustness (even when one or more individuals fail, the group can still perform its tasks).

With self-organization, the behavior of the group is often unpredictable, emerging from the collective interactions of all of the individuals. The simple rules by which individuals interact can generate complex group behavior. Indeed, the emergence of such collective behavior out of simple rules is one the great lessons of swarm intelligence.

[...]Solutions to problems are emergent rather than predefined and preprogrammed. The problem is that you don't always know ahead of time what emergent solution will come out because emergent behavior is unpredictable. If applied well, self-organization endows your swarm with the ability to adapt to situations that you didn't think of. This approach has proven itself in a number of situations, ranging from network routing to factory scheduling to supply chain optimization to controlling groups of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles). But it does require a drastic shift in mindset.

[...]However, we're reaching a stage in technology where you no longer have a choice: your mindset has to change or you'll be screwed. It's no longer possible to use traditional, centralized, hierarchical command and control techniques to deal with systems that have thousands or even millions of dynamically changing, communicating, heterogeneous entities. I think that the type of solution swarm intelligence offers is the only way of moving forward, you have to rethink the way you control complex distributed systems."