Ants are a great example of a self-organized complex system. They've figured out sustainable solutions to a lot of common collective action problems that all social organisms have to deal with, including humans: the division of labor, the production and distribution of resources, the management of waste and the raising of the young.

They are proof that you can have an agriculturally mature, technologically sophisticated eusocial self-organized system that will last for 100 million years. In contrast, humans have been a primarily agricultural species for less that 15,000 years, and our methods are demonstrably unsustainable. We could stand to learn a lot from the ants.

The ants solve their problems by tagging their environment with rich information about their own history. Our own technological situation is starting to give us the ability to do the same for human contexts, and we're working to make that augmentation explicit.

If you are interested in ants, Deborah Gordon's TED talk is an endless source of inspiration. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukS4UjCauUs

What will humans do with ant superpowers? I can't wait to find out =)