Autonomy versus Control

Transport in nature encourages local control over Central control.

Empowering the final worker to take decision without waiting for hierarchy.

Deborah Gordon is studying ants behavior for 20 years in the Arizona desert.

1.  Ants have been around for several hundred million years. They cover the whole earth, except for Antarctica. The desert ants run two exquisite but complicated system one related to infrastructure and the other transportation. 

 The infra-ants build a colony of nice honey combs, one meter wide and one meter deep into the earth over the years and line the walls of the chambers with moist soil that dries to a kind of porcelain glaze.

  In an ant colony 10,000 ants live, feed their larvae, build infra, also operate one of the most complicated transport systems to forage and bring back enough food against all challenges.
 An ant colony simulates a factory that works with the precision and efficiency of clockwork and at an optimised operating cost.
1a. The desert ants while going out foraging for food, lose excess water. But the seeds that they brought in, metabolises enough water for the whole colony. This determines the operating cost of an ant colony.  In the desert of Arizona, operating costs are high because water is scarce, and the seed-eating ants have to spend water to get water. 
1b.Challenges:

  When it rains in the summer, it floods in the desert. There’s a lot of damage to the nest, and extra infrastructure ants are needed to clean up that mess. 

  In tropics, losing water is not a problem. But the climate encourages more species of ants  and a stiff competition from a neighboring colony for the limited resources.

 If you put an extra lump of Sugar, in no time a well organized traffic mops up the extra food without a trace.

… …

  Deborah says ants do not have any central control. The queen leaves too deep that’s one meter down the earth. And to send chemical messages through this whole network of chambers to direct the ants stationed outside is impractical. There is no way that such messages could make it in time to see the shifts in the allocation of workers. 

  So, with nobody telling anybody what to do, how is it that the colony manages to adjust the numbers of workers performing each task?

  It looks like EACH ANT is deciding moment to moment whether to be active or not. It’s a simple local decision rule that optimises the operating cost. 
   An ant on a mission always contacts an incoming ant by a gentle touch of antenna. The pattern of antennae touch is the exchange of signal.

  Each ant uses the pattern of its antennal contacts,the rate at which it meets ants of other tasks, in deciding what to do. It’s the rate at which they meet as they come in and out of the nest entrance influences, each ant’s decision about whether to go out, and which task to perform.
Similar local control also operates in two more intricate transport systems  inside our body.
2. Blood: 

We have a rolling stock of 20 billion RBCs and a track lay out of million km of arteries and veins. We have strategically placed production units and recycling units. 

  But half way at the waist level who decides which batch of RBCs will go to kidneys and which ones to liver ? It’s always a local control.
3. Brain:

 Our CNS transports billions of data packets instantaneously. When you step on a thorn while looking at a flower, your foot jerks up. That’s no mean work. The sync operation of a bundle of muscles, vessels and millions of data packets is surprisingly a locally controlled pain reflex.
4.  Internet protocol (IP) mimics BRAIN to reduce the operating cost of bandwidth. The IP mandates that data doesn’t leave the source computer unless it gets a signal that there’s enough bandwidth for it to travel. 

  These are instances of empowering the down below that nature has taken few billion years to evolve and still following.