Future of work

A single mega-colony of ants has colonised much of the world, scientists have discovered. Argentine ants living in vast numbers across Europe, the US and Japan belong to the same inter-related colony, and will refuse to fight one another. The colony may b

Pierre-Paul Grasse first coined the term stigmergy in the 1950s in conjunction with his research on termites. Grasse showed that a particular configuration of a termite's environment (as in the case of building and maintaining a nest) triggered a response

The third of the four principles of multicellular systems is that much of the communication between cooperating entities (cells, social insects or computers) is indirect. The entities deposit long-lived cues in external structures -- connective tissue, te

The authors examine how susceptible jobs are to computerisation, by implementing a novel methodology to estimate the probability of computerisation for 702 detailed occupations, using a Gaussian process classifier. Based on these estimates, they examine e

As we move into a new way of work - one based on more fluid and looser connections, grounded in freethinking, humanist and scientific approaches to the social contract - it's becoming clear that the traditional model of "collaboration tools" is based arou