I read two items within a few minutes of each other, and while they initially seemed unrelated, on reflection it occurred to me that the Era of the Swarm is now well underway.
The first item has to do with coordinating the behavior of heavy machinery. As reported in Technology Review, a company called REGEN Energy is selling wireless units that can attach to machinery and modify their power consumption. What’s nice about it is there is no need for fancy top-down centralized control based on (often mythical) perfect information. Just plug the units in and they can find each other and adopt economizing behavior. A simple example of this is: don’t turn on multiple air conditioners at the same time. That’s the command-and-control version of the rule, though. The decentralized version would go like this: “Does anybody around here mind if I fire up in about ten seconds? ‘Cause I can wait if that’s going to cause a problem.” I don’t know if this particular product will take off, but insect-based reasoning is certainly on the rise.
The second item I read had to do with the behavior of young voters. The question is: how do they find their news? The answer, and the money quote from the article is: “If the news is that important, it will find me.” Rather than getting information from a single all-knowing news source that has access to (often mythical) perfect information, young people are more likely to rely on a network of forwarded links from their friends, Twitter, Facebook, and blogs (ahem).
I, for one, welcome our new insect overbrain.
Rambles Blog at Star Chamber 
Actully, our swarm methodology is even more subtle and less interlocked than the description above. There’s no negotiation between controllers (as unfortunately noted in the MIT Tech Review article, a slight oversight but common misconception). Instead, each controller informs the swarm of its own activity, listens for the activity of its peers, and then makes its own independent, autonomous decision.
In nature, there’s no negotiation between organisms in a collective; each simply goes about its business doing what it needs to do, although in a manner that is as brutally efficient as possible to help move the collective towards some higher group goal.
As for whether EnviroGrid as a product will “take off”, I’m currently in San Francisco (particularly for tomorrow’s GreenNet 09 conference), and the utilities, VCs, and industry experts are all telling us we’re on to something huge. Stay tuned…
If you’re interested, you can follow an announcement this evening at 6PM Pacific on a live blog (http://www.fatspaniel.com/news-events/blog), also to be twittered.