[chipsy]

We have a built environment that influences each moment-to-moment action: For example, architecture is full of little tricks that influence crowd routing without actively telling people "YOU THERE, go this way." UX is a whole field about this kind of stuff.

So what we have is better than the ants in certain ways, because we have an ever-increasing capacity to reprogram behaviors and reason about them without relying on genetic changes; it's going to surface itself as an ugly, inefficient, inequitable, system because we use human judgment to fill in so many gaps, but that's why we also have such a strong incentive to keep automating everything.