Week 4 Section 2 - Allen Wang - Are insects ruled by a grater mind?

http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/4/1/reviews/kluegl.html

It has been a great question whether insects, as a colony, have more intelligence than a single unit of the insect colony. Though the single ant worker would wander around aimlessly, even for life, without serving a purpose. Yet, as a colony, ants can achieve many great goals every day. Every day, food and found and collected with the help of the colony as a whole. With the work as a whole, ants can get much accomplished. Each by doing their part for the colony, ants can fight when in danger and collect when food is avaliable.
While forging, ants actually give off different scents for different types of food. Different smells tell the other ants that different foods are avaliable, therefore if different types of food is found, the ants would prioritize and go for the more important and nutrictious food first, then go to collect the latter of the food, if the food is still there.
While forging may be an important part of the ant life, there are other jobs avaliable too. Other jobs consists of caring for the larva or the storage of the incoming food. By working together, ants can make jobs efficient and faster. Though all the workers are almost identical in every way, they all play an important role in that ant colony as a whole. This delegation of tasks is just like that of a robot, in which a robot is each assigned a different job, such as, a refrigerator is only for storing food and a car is for transportation. By each working is important tasks, a society is created. If each ant diverges and works on different tasks, ineffieicny is created, such as if a car is used to cook food by heating up its engine, it may work but it'll be inefficient.
For ant colonies, there also exists the job to create new paths and repair broken ones. by coperating with one another, ants can survive. It is based ona trust system in which each ant, though identical, is programmed to perform different tasks. The insect colony is efficient on its own terms, but each individual worker does the work that is insignificant. If a few worker ants died, the ant colony would still survive, but is the colony died and the worker ants scattered, their survival rate would decrease drastically.
It is without doubt that insects require the ability of the colony to survive. As an individual, ants would be lost. And this insect colony represents both the human and robot society that exists today. Our jobs, to be blunt, is very insignificant to the human race as a whole, but together, we help advance the world. Though there are a few selected few, such as Bill Gates or Newton, that actually shape and advance the world individually, there are very few, compared to the size of the population as a whole, that have actually impacted the lives of colony as a whole.
Therefore, in a mattter of speaking, we are after all living in a colony, mindlessly. We have the abiliy to be significant though. The creative thinkers of the world help shape the world while others jsut walk about accepting whatever comes and do what others order them to do. We, as the human race, in a greater sense, are no more free from the colony than the ants of a ant colony are free.