] My experience trying to "sell" the concepts of swarm
] intelligence to the commercial world is that managers
] would rather live with a problem they can't solve than
] with a solution they don't fully understand or control.
] So the mindset is a big barrier to adoption.

A lot of whats going on these days in computing is related to these ideas. Of course, the difference between Ant and People is that an Ant will tell the colony if it finds food, whereas People will secure the "food" and charge access. The difference is that Ants don't compete with eachother for resources. They don't have to. Their resources are infinite. This, of course, is the reason these questions are so interesting in terms of information. Information isn't scarce.

OpenP2P.com: Swarm Intelligence: An Interview with Eric Bonabeau [Feb. 21, 2003]