In another foretaste of the new machine age (and what it means for jobs), engineers at Harvard have programmed small robots to build like termites:
“Termites build air-conditioned mounds by taking cues from each other and the environment to tell them where to put the next bit of building material. The Harvard researchers wrote computer programs for their robots to mimic the insects’ behaviour and particularly their use of local information.
Though each robot knows only simple rules – such as when to pick up and put down a brick, turn around or climb one step up the structure – together they act in a quasi-intelligent way capable of completing a predefined structure.”