Continuing to develop a robot theme, "Ants - learning from the collective" once again brings us an example of basing our robots off of nature. If this works, if they make real, useful robots, especially nanotech robots, on these ideas, we will, once again, be significantly blurring the lines between life and non-life, intelligence, and what Neil Stephenson would call "pseudo-intelligence." Again, I raise the specter of irony: several hundred years from now, the thought of these robots having been created will be as ludicrous to "science" as the thought of man having been created is now. Of course this implies a break down of history at some point, so that things must needs be rediscovered. Any number of things could cause that though, give or take a thousand years and you might not even need a breakdown, just the normal blurring of time and the change of preferred format for information.
