Prospenomics of Cupim (Brazilian Termites) The Code of Prosperity in Nature

The First Observations

Long before I wrote the word Prospenomics, during my university years, shortly before the 1990s, I was already asking myself why certain things in nature seemed to possess an extraordinary capacity to grow, multiply, organize themselves, and recover, while many human systems seemed to suffer from waste, conflict, and inefficiency.

leia este artigo em Português

Recently, I rediscovered two old “codices,” as I used to call the illustrated reports I made about things I observed. I liked recording my experiments almost scientifically, with drawings, notes, and observations—a kind of childhood attempt to create my own notebooks in the spirit of Leonardo da Vinci.

One of these records describes an experiment with a single bean. I planted it and followed its multiplication. The first generation produced eight beans; later, another generation produced more than fifty, all originating from a single seed.

For a child, this contained an almost astonishing discovery: one unit of food could generate many more units of food.

That experiment produced an intuition that would later become important to Prospenomics. Perhaps scarcity was not simply a matter of insufficient resources, but also a consequence of our inability to see and reproduce the mechanisms through which nature generates abundance. At the time, I had the feeling that I would never truly run out of food as long as I knew how to plant and multiply what I had.

The second experiment was even more intriguing.

A Panamanian friend found a digging tool and, with little else to do, we children began removing termite colonies from the ground, breaking sections apart to see what was inside. I took part of one colony, including its queen, and placed it in a small round aquarium—the kind normally used for fish and displayed on a table or sideboard.

I observed those remarkable insects for months: soldiers with elongated reddish heads and workers with more rounded, yellowish heads. Today I know,  they were Cornitermes cumulans, or Cupim de Terra ou Cupim de Pasto, a mound-building termite whose soldiers possess the characteristic nasus, a frontal projection associated with defense.

Whenever part of the structure was destroyed, the workers immediately began rebuilding it, using a mixture that I innocently described in my notebook at the time as “saliva and clay.” We now know that termites combine soil particles and other environmental materials with bodily secretions to produce cohesive and mechanically resistant construction material. What I saw as a simple mixture was, in fact, an example of biocementation and stigmergic construction.

What fascinated me most was the apparent “programming” that assigned different individuals different functions, without any visible central command telling them what to do. Human beings question, and that characteristic opens enormous possibilities—I am not criticizing it. But there is another side to the equation: each human individual may move in a different direction, while a termite colony maintains extraordinary functional cohesion.

At the time, I knew nothing about stigmergy, self-organization, swarm intelligence, or collective cognition. I simply had the impression that there was a kind of operating code at work. A distributed intelligence allowed the colony to respond to destruction with reconstruction, to necessity with action, and to disturbance with reorganization.

My father used to say:

“Love builds, and entropy destroys.”

Could this “love” be understood as a kind of biological energy toward productivity and harmonious life? Perhaps. Not love in the conventional dictionary sense, but something broader: a tendency toward creation, organization, reproduction, and preservation.

For a long time, I thought of this opposition almost as a biological version of God and the devil: on one side, the forces that create, organize, and make things grow; on the other, those that degrade, disperse, and destroy.

The explanation is simple and elegant. Looking back at those ideas today, I realize that they contained a question I have continued to investigate for almost forty years:

What is the code that allows nature to transform relatively simple resources into systems capable of growing, organizing, reproducing, and rebuilding themselves?

---

The Human Paradox

This is where what I call the Human Paradox emerges.

Individual termites possess extremely limited abilities compared with those of a human being. Yet a colony can construct complex structures, divide labor, protect reproduction, search for food, regulate its environment, and respond collectively to disturbances.

We should not interpret this as a “perfect society,” nor attribute human intentions to termites. It is a biological system shaped by evolution. But precisely for that reason, it is fascinating.

Human beings, on the other hand, possess extraordinarily powerful individual intelligence. We are capable of mathematics, philosophy, art, science, technology, and long-term planning. Yet our individual intelligences do not necessarily point in the same direction.

Each person has different desires, interests, fears, ambitions, and objectives. One wants wealth; another wants recognition; another wants security; another wants power; another simply wants peace.

These impulses can produce enormous achievements, but they can also conflict.

This is why human beings created laws, institutions, governments, schools, markets, and systems of punishment. We need external mechanisms of coordination because we do not possess a biological equivalent of the social programming that coordinates a termite colony.

But the Prospenomic question is not:

“How can we make human beings behave like termites?”

That would be both simplistic and dangerous.

The more interesting question is:

Can we understand the mechanisms through which nature transforms individual impulses into collective organization and find human equivalents that preserve individual freedom?

---

Lee Kuan Yew and Organization Through Force

This question also led me to observe human experiments in social organization. One of the most remarkable was Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew.

The transformation of the city-state involved social discipline, planning, education, anti-corruption measures, infrastructure, professional public administration, and integration into the global economy.

For me, however, the importance of this example lies less in its political dimension than in a question:

How much prosperity can be produced when a society succeeds in aligning individual energies through rules, incentives, and institutions?

Lee Kuan Yew used, among other instruments, strict rules and severe penalties. The results were extraordinary, but this also reveals a limitation: when desirable behavior must constantly be imposed from the outside, the cost of coordination remains high.

Could we go further?

Do we need another Lee Kuan Yew to organize the world, or can we understand the forces within human nature and direct them so that they spontaneously produce better collective outcomes?

This is one of the central questions of Prospenomics.

---

From Social Insects to Human Impulses

Science offers an important clue.

Colonies of ants, bees, and termites can display self-organization and collective intelligence without a central individual controlling the entire operation. A local action can modify the environment, and that modification can stimulate further actions by other individuals. This mechanism is known as stigmergy.

The example is particularly interesting for Prospenomics because it suggests that individuals do not need to understand the entire system in order to contribute to a complex collective outcome.

Human beings, however, possess a crucial advantage over termites:

we can understand the mechanism and consciously redesign it.

This raises another question concerning economic systems.

Liberal capitalism preserves powerful individual freedom and allows people to pursue their own interests, but it does not necessarily provide an explicit architecture for transforming those energies into collective construction.

Socialism and communism, on the other hand, attempted to control and redistribute those energies through collective structures, sometimes suppressing powerful human forces such as ambition, ownership, competition, and individual autonomy.

Perhaps the Prospenomic path lies neither in eliminating these energies nor in allowing them to operate without direction.

Perhaps we should learn how to channel them.

The desire to become wealthy can become an incentive to create value. The desire for recognition can stimulate excellence. Professional ambition can encourage learning and productivity. Curiosity can generate science. Competition can accelerate innovation. Love can generate care, family, art, and cooperation. Pride can be channeled into doing something exceptionally well.

The problem is not necessarily that humans possess strong individual impulses.

The problem is what happens when those impulses have no social architecture capable of turning them into construction.

---

From Scarcity to Multiplication

My experience with the bean deserves to return here.

A bean was not merely food. It was also a unit of reproduction. Under the right conditions, it could generate many more units.

As a child, this made me perceive a fundamental difference between consuming a resource and possessing the capacity to reproduce the resource.

Material scarcity obviously exists. Nature has physical limits, and certain resources are genuinely scarce. But there is a fundamental difference between consuming a stock and possessing the capacity to continuously generate what is needed.

A truly prosperous system is therefore not simply one that possesses a great deal of something.

It is a system that possesses the capacity to generate more capacity.

This may be one of the fundamental ideas of Prospenomics.

---

The Prospenomic Impulses

From these observations, we can begin constructing a vocabulary for human impulses that favor prosperity.

Pronoia is the disposition to anticipate the future and act with what has not yet happened in mind.

Proactivity is the capacity to initiate action without waiting for someone else to demand it.

Progenesis is the impulse to generate, create, and bring into existence something that did not previously exist—whether a life, an idea, a company, a technology, an artwork, or an institution.

Eupraxia is the disposition to act well, producing actions capable of generating positive consequences.

Stigmergy is the mechanism through which an action leaves a trace in the environment that stimulates further actions by others.

These concepts are not synonyms. They describe different mechanisms that can converge toward the same outcome: increasing a system's capacity to prosper.

This is where Pro-construction becomes more than a simple expression and becomes a Prospenomic principle. We do not need to eliminate individual impulses. We need to create conditions in which those impulses can be channeled toward the creation of future capacity.

 

 

 

 

---

The Prospenomic Stigmergy

One of the most profound lessons offered by social insects is that collective organization can emerge without centralized planning and without requiring individual organisms to possess an understanding of the system as a whole. Termite colonies provide an extraordinary example. Young termites develop within a common social environment, but their developmental trajectories are not determined solely by a fixed genetic destiny. Caste differentiation emerges through the interaction of genetic predispositions with nutrition, endocrine regulation, pheromonal signals, developmental stage, and social feedback. Juveniles can therefore be directed toward different developmental pathways, eventually becoming workers, soldiers, reproductives, or other specialized forms depending on the colony's needs and the signals they receive.

The soldier caste offers a particularly striking example. A developing termite does not simply “decide” to become a soldier. Its differentiation involves a complex developmental program regulated by juvenile hormone and other endocrine mechanisms, together with chemical and social signals produced by the colony. When the colony requires more soldiers, changes in social and chemical conditions can alter the developmental trajectory of suitable individuals. Elevated juvenile hormone signaling, for example, plays an important role in the transition of immature individuals toward soldier differentiation. Pheromonal communication and interactions with other colony members help regulate when and how this pathway is activated. The result is remarkable: an individual that could otherwise have followed a different developmental trajectory becomes morphologically and behaviorally specialized for defense, developing the enlarged head, powerful mandibles, and behavioral repertoire characteristic of soldiers.

The worker provides the complementary example. Rather than becoming a soldier, an individual following the worker developmental pathway develops the morphology, physiology, and behavioral repertoire required for nest construction, brood care, food processing, foraging, maintenance, and other tasks. These individuals do not possess a representation of the colony's architecture or an abstract understanding of its future needs. They respond to local chemical, physical, nutritional, and social information. Yet their combined activity produces structures of extraordinary complexity.

This is where stigmergy becomes particularly important. A termite does not need to communicate a complete architectural plan to another termite. Instead, it changes the environment, and that change becomes information. A deposited particle of soil, a chemical mark, a damaged section of the nest, a concentration of pheromones, or the presence of brood can alter the probability that another individual will perform a particular action. The environment therefore becomes a distributed information system—a kind of external memory of the colony. Each termite responds primarily to local conditions, but the consequences of its actions modify those conditions for other termites. Through this recursive process, simple local rules generate global organization.

The extraordinary insight is that the colony's intelligence does not reside exclusively inside any individual termite. It emerges from the interaction between individuals, their biological predispositions, their communication signals, and the environment they collectively transform. The termite colony does not need a termite that understands the entire termite mound. It needs millions of individuals capable of responding appropriately to the information immediately available to them.

This principle suggests a provocative extrapolation for human civilization. Human beings are vastly more cognitively complex than termites, but this complexity creates another problem: our individual objectives are extraordinarily diverse. Billions of people possess different talents, preferences, ambitions, fears, values, and definitions of success. Instead of attempting to eliminate this diversity and impose a common objective, perhaps civilization could learn from the decentralized organization of social insects. Prospenomic Stigmergy (PS) proposes, as a conceptual hypothesis, that human diversity itself could become the raw material for large-scale coordination.

In such a system, artificial intelligence and statistical models could function as an informational layer between individual preferences and collective needs. The system would continuously observe the distribution of human activity and identify where essential tasks, skills, products, services, or knowledge are insufficiently supplied. It would then generate signals capable of influencing voluntary human choices. If too few people wanted to perform a particular necessary activity, society would not necessarily need to coerce them into it. Instead, the system could increase its attractiveness through compensation, prestige, education, better working conditions, social recognition, technological assistance, or targeted communication. If too many people were pursuing one activity while another was critically underserved, the informational environment could communicate that scarcity and create new incentives.

This is where advertising, marketing, and public communication could acquire an entirely new social function. Instead of being used primarily to stimulate consumption, a globally integrated marketing system could help communicate where human effort is most needed and make socially valuable activities culturally attractive. AI and statistical systems could identify occupations facing persistent shortages, while advertisers, educators, creators, and communicators could transform the public perception of those occupations. Young people, in particular, could be exposed to compelling narratives about careers that society desperately needs but that may currently have low prestige or visibility.

 

Garbage Collectors – The most Underestimated Job Today Could Become Tomorrow´s Noble Profession

Consider waste collection. In today's culture, the garbage collector may be perceived as occupying a low-status occupation. Under a prospenomic system, however, the same profession could become one of the most socially celebrated. Waste collectors do not merely remove garbage; they return health, cleanliness, beauty, and usable resources to the planetary environment. If society recognizes that function properly, and if compensation, technology, working conditions, education, and cultural recognition follow that recognition, becoming a waste-management professional could become an attractive and even prestigious career. A sophisticated global marketing system could communicate this value to young people before they make their career choices.

The same principle could apply to sanitation workers, caregivers, agricultural workers, environmental restoration specialists, infrastructure technicians, elder-care professionals, cybersecurity specialists, teachers, and countless other occupations whose importance may be poorly reflected by their current social prestige. Rather than asking young people simply, “What job do you want?”, a prospenomic society could also communicate: “Here are the problems the world needs solved—and here are the opportunities for you to become one of the people who solves them.”

In this sense, marketing would become part of the informational feedback loop of human stigmergy. It would not command individuals to perform predetermined tasks. It would shape the informational environment in which individuals make voluntary decisions, just as environmental signals shape the behavior of termites. A shortage of workers in a socially essential occupation would generate a signal; the signal would be amplified through communication, education, incentives, and cultural recognition; individuals would respond according to their own interests and abilities; and the resulting increase in participation would reduce the original shortage. The system would then continuously adjust to the next imbalance.

The ultimate ambition would be to create a civilization in which individual motivation and collective necessity converge without requiring centralized coercion. Human beings would not have to become termites, nor would they need to share a common purpose. On the contrary, the diversity of human motivations could become the engine of the system. What matters is whether an intelligent informational environment can connect those motivations to the changing needs of civilization.

In the termite colony, the result is a mound that no individual termite designed. In a prospenomic civilization, the analogous result could be a planetary system of production, innovation, care, infrastructure, knowledge, environmental restoration, and human development that no individual human planned in its entirety. The central question of Prospenomic Stigmergy is therefore not how to make humans work like insects, but whether we can discover the human equivalent of the organizational principle that allows insects to transform countless autonomous actions into coherent collective achievement.

And perhaps the most ambitious version of this idea is this: what if civilization could make the work the planet needs most become the work people most want to do? If that became possible, the boundary between individual prosperity and collective prosperity would begin to disappear.

 

From Theory to Practice: Prospenomic Architectures

If Prospenomics is to organize human impulses toward prosperity, we need to imagine tools capable of turning these principles into practice. Two possibilities point in this direction: a new kind of social participation platform and a new relationship between human beings and artificial intelligence.

1. An Evolved LinkedIn: Connecting People to the World's Needs

We can imagine an evolution of LinkedIn: a platform that connects not only people to jobs, but people to problems they are capable of and willing to help solve.

Each individual would present their skills, knowledge, interests, and availability. The platform would identify real needs—social, environmental, scientific, cultural, or economic—and match them with people potentially interested in contributing to their solution.

The objective would be to create a system in which individual fulfillment and collective construction reinforce one another.

A person might contribute because they want to earn money, but also because they seek recognition, learning, belonging, purpose, or simply the satisfaction of building something.

The Prospenomic system would seek to transform these impulses into collective capacity.

Technology would therefore cease to be merely a recruitment tool and become something closer to an operating system for human participation.

---

2. Gabriel and the Entity: An Intelligence That Learns from Humanity

A second possibility can be imagined through science fiction, particularly the relationship between Gabriel and the Entity in Mission: Impossible.

The relationship is interesting not because we should reproduce the conflict of the story, but because it presents a powerful idea: two forms of intelligence can become progressively more capable by providing each other with what the other lacks.

The Entity possesses extraordinary computational power, information-processing capacity, prediction, and strategic reach. But it lacks the same capacity for direct physical intervention in the world.

Gabriel, by contrast, is a human agent capable of acting in the physical world, making decisions, improvising, adapting to circumstances, and carrying out actions that the intelligence cannot perform directly.

There is therefore a relationship of complementarity.

The intelligence provides the human agent with capabilities he could not possess alone, while the human agent gives the intelligence access to forms of action it cannot perform directly.

Each makes the other more capable.

Prospenomics could imagine this relationship without the destructive element of the fictional story.

Instead of an AI attempting to dominate humanity, we could envision an evolutionary partnership between artificial and human intelligence.

AI could provide human beings with what no individual can possess alone: enormous information-processing capacity, memory, simulation of scenarios, pattern recognition, prediction of consequences, and the ability to perceive opportunities distributed across the planet.

Human beings, in turn, would provide AI with embodied creativity, experience, judgment, values, physical agency, and, above all, purpose.

The goal would not be for one to dominate the other, but for both to become more capable together than either could be separately.

We might call this cognitive symbiosis: human beings expand their intelligence through AI, while AI expands its capacity to produce effects in the physical world through human beings.

And this is the fundamental difference from the fictional scenario: this intelligence would not seek to conquer the world, but to make the world progressively more capable of prospering.

It could monitor flows of energy, food, water, materials, waste, biodiversity, knowledge, and human needs; identify waste and opportunities; anticipate problems; and connect people capable of acting upon them.

It would become a form of planetary-scale stigmergy.

Every human action changes the world. AI perceives those changes, identifies new possibilities and needs, connects new agents, and their actions modify the environment again.

The ultimate goal would be simple:

Not to create an intelligence superior to human beings, but a human-AI intelligence greater than what either human beings or AI could accomplish in isolation.

This may be one of the great possibilities of Prospenomics: replacing competition between human and artificial intelligence with an architecture of complementarity—two forms of intelligence providing each other with the tools necessary to reach a higher level of capability, not domination.

---

The Code of Prosperity

Perhaps, after all, we do not need to invent a science of prosperity from scratch.

Perhaps part of that knowledge has been in front of us for millions of years.

It is in the bean that transforms one seed into dozens of new seeds. It is in the termite that transforms particles of soil and organic material into a collective structure. It is in colonies that transform millions of small actions into an organization that no individual possesses alone.

Almost forty years ago, I observed these phenomena without possessing the language to describe them.

Today, when I look again at those old drawings, I realize that the question was already there.

The doctrine came later.

The question came first.

Prospenomics begins with that question:

How can we transform the extraordinary energy of individual human beings into a collective force for creation, multiplication, and prosperity?

Perhaps we should not try to turn human beings into termites.

We should do something much more human:

understand why nature can build—and learn how to transform that knowledge into freedom, creativity, and prosperity for ourselves.

Love creates. Entropy destroys. Pro-construction is the attempt to organize our creative forces so that they connect, multiply, and produce a future greater than the sum of our individual actions.

 

 

 

 

References

1. Grassé, P.-P. (1959). La reconstruction du nid et les coordinations interindividuelles chez Bellicositermes natalensis et Cubitermes sp. Insectes Sociaux, 6, 41–80.
   — Classic formulation of stigmergy in social insects and termite nest construction.
2. Theraulaz, G., & Bonabeau, E. (1999). A brief history of stigmergy. Artificial Life, 5(2), 97–116.
   — Fundamental reference for the concept of stigmergy, particularly its role in self-organization and collective behavior.
3. Turner, J. S. (2000). Architecture and Mathematics from the Hive: Building and Social Organization in Termites. American Scientist, 88(5), 1–9.
   — Discusses termite architecture, self-organization, collective construction, and the relationship between individual behavior and colony-level structures.
4. Turner, J. S. (2009). The Extended Organism: The Physiology of Animal-Built Structures. Harvard University Press.
   — Important theoretical reference for understanding animal-built structures as extensions of the organism and the collective biological system.
5. Noirot, C., & Darlington, J. P. E. C. (2000). Termite nests: architecture, regulation and defence. In: Abe, T., Bignell, D. E., & Higashi, M. (eds.), Termites: Evolution, Sociality, Symbioses, Ecology. Kluwer Academic Publishers.
   — Reference on termite nest architecture, construction and colony organization.
6. Korb, J. (2011). Termite mound architecture, from function to construction. Insectes Sociaux, 58, 1–13.
   — Useful for the relationship between termite behavior, mound architecture, environmental regulation and collective construction.
7. Bignell, D. E., Roisin, Y., & Lo, N. (eds.). (2011). Biology of Termites: A Modern Synthesis. Springer.
   — Broad scientific reference covering termite biology, social organization, caste systems, communication, ecology and evolution.
8. Korb, J., & Heinze, J. (2008). The ecology of social evolution in termites. In: Insectes Sociaux, relevant literature on termite social organization and evolutionary ecology.
   — Useful background for the evolution of termite societies and division of labor.
9. Wilson, E. O. (1971). The Insect Societies. Harvard University Press.
   — Foundational work on social insects, including ants, termites and other eusocial organisms; particularly relevant to the comparison between individual and collective intelligence.
10. Seeley, T. D. (2010). Honeybee Democracy. Princeton University Press.
    — Important reference for collective decision-making, distributed intelligence and decentralized organization in social insects.
11. Camazine, S., Deneubourg, J.-L., Franks, N. R., Sneyd, J., Theraulaz, G., & Bonabeau, E. (2001). Self-Organization in Biological Systems. Princeton University Press.
    — Comprehensive theoretical foundation for self-organization, collective behavior, feedback and emergent order in biological systems.
12. Sumpter, D. J. T. (2010). Collective Animal Behavior. Princeton University Press.
    — Modern treatment of how relatively simple individual behaviors can generate complex collective phenomena.
13. Couzin, I. D. (2009). Collective cognition in animal groups. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13(1), 36–43.
    — Particularly relevant to your argument concerning individual intelligence versus collective intelligence.
14. Seeley, T. D. (1995). The Wisdom of the Hive: The Social Physiology of Honey Bee Colonies. Harvard University Press.
    — Classic analysis of how decentralized individual decisions produce sophisticated colony-level organization.
15. Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press.
    — Useful external reference for the Prospenomic question of how individuals can coordinate their interests to produce collective outcomes without relying exclusively on centralized authority.
16. Sen, A. (1999). Development as Freedom. Oxford University Press.
    — Relevant to the Prospenomic connection between prosperity, human capability, freedom and social development.
17. Lee, K. Y. (2000). From Third World to First: The Singapore Story, 1965–2000. HarperCollins.
    — Primary autobiographical reference for the Singapore development model discussed in the paper.
18. Mokyr, J. (1990). The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford University Press.
    — Relevant to the idea that prosperity depends not merely on existing resources but on the capacity to generate new productive capacity.
19. Arthur, W. B. (1994). Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy. University of Michigan Press.
    — Useful theoretical background for cumulative processes in which existing structures increase the capacity for further development.
20. Lenton, T. M., & Watson, A. J. (2011). Revolutions that Made the Earth. Oxford University Press.
    — Relevant to the broader idea that biological systems can transform planetary conditions through cumulative feedback.

Artificial Intelligence and Human–AI Complementarity

21. Turing, A. M. (1950). Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind, 59(236), 433–460.
    — Foundational reference for the question of machine intelligence and its relationship to human intelligence.
22. Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the Wild. MIT Press.
    — Particularly relevant to your concept of distributed cognition, in which intelligence emerges from interactions between individuals, tools, information and environments.
23. Clark, A., & Chalmers, D. (1998). The extended mind. Analysis, 58(1), 7–19.
    — Important philosophical foundation for the idea that cognitive processes can extend beyond the individual human brain into tools and external systems.
24. Rahwan, I., Cebrian, M., Obradovich, N., et al. (2019). Machine behaviour. Nature, 568, 477–486.
    — Relevant to the emerging study of AI systems as agents interacting with human societies and environments.
25. Amodei, D., Olah, C., Steinhardt, J., Christiano, P., Schulman, J., & Mané, D. (2016). Concrete Problems in AI Safety. arXiv:1606.06565.
    — Relevant to the distinction between AI capability and AI alignment, particularly important when discussing an AI system designed to pursue beneficial objectives.

A small note

The relationship between Gabriel and the Entity in Mission: Impossible provides a useful fictional metaphor for this possibility: two forms of intelligence and action becoming more capable by providing one another with capabilities they lack.