Human Stigmergy: The world is my task list

Summary

Marco Giancotti,July 10, 2025Cover image:Termite mound cross-section, Wikimedia CommonsTermites and ants have no central planning. There are no architect ants in a nest-building project, no sponsors or supervisors, no instructions. Each worker is unaware and completely uninterested in what form the final mega-structure will take. No blueprints are to be found in any of their minds or outside them. Yet they build them all the time, and very well, too. Their substitute for plans and blueprints is what biologists call stigmergy. Each worker instinctively marks the environment with pheromones as it works—the termite infuses it in the dollops of mud it deposits, the ant marks the path it took to find food—then other workers smell the pheromone and act based on it. This is repeated by each insect, and it is all they need to build and stock their great cathedrals, complete with effective ventilation shafts, highways leading straight to the best sources of food, and everything else they need to thrive. This topic never ceases to fascinate me. It's a demonstration that great things can be achieved together in a fully decentralized way. Intelligence can be distributed rather than fenced off. The exercise of power isn't the only way. But stigmergy interests me in yet another way—a more mundane and pragmatic way: it is proof that there are other kinds of memory besides the "mental". I have a terrible memory, and I forget the concrete and ephemeral duties and to-dos of my daily life all the time. I've learned to trust my ability to remember to do things exactly 0%. I live on the solid certainty that I will forget things. To-do apps and notes help, but they're never enough. Digital supports have the fatal flaw of requiring me to remember to check my digital devices—something I do often, but not necessarily when I need it. A single termite isn't very smart. I doubt it even knows what it is doing while carrying its ball-shaped bricks up its half-constructed mound. I'm grateful to i...