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

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.

 

 Supplementary text

Fungi as Prospenomic Agents: From Decomposition to Regeneration

Fungi occupy a fundamental position in the Earth's biological economy. As decomposers, mutualists, and participants in complex microbial communities, they contribute to the transformation of organic matter, nutrient mineralization, carbon cycling, soil formation, and the continuous redistribution of matter through ecosystems. Rather than viewing decomposition as mere destruction, Prospenomics can interpret it as biological conversion: material that has completed one stage of its existence is transformed into substrates, nutrients, and molecular resources that can support subsequent forms of life. In this sense, fungi participate in one of nature's most important prospenomic processes—the conversion of what appears to be waste, decay, or biological residue into renewed ecological capacity.

The termite provides an especially revealing example because its prosperity depends not on the termite alone, but on an assemblage of biological collaborators. In many termites, digestion of lignocellulosic material depends on a complex gut microbiota; in lower termites, cellulolytic flagellate protists play an essential role, while in more derived lineages the digestive community is predominantly prokaryotic, with bacteria performing important metabolic functions. These microorganisms effectively extend the termite's biological capabilities beyond what its own genome and physiology could accomplish independently. In fungus-growing termites of the Macrotermitinae, an additional layer of symbiosis occurs: the colony cultivates Termitomyces in specialized fungus combs, where the fungus processes plant material and contributes nutrients to the colony. Thus, the termite colony can be understood as a distributed biological production system, in which different organisms perform complementary transformations and collectively increase the system's capacity to extract value from its environment.

This observation suggests a broader Prospenomic principle: prosperity emerges when independent capabilities become complementary. The termite does not need to become a fungus, and the fungus does not need to become a termite. Each organism retains its own biological identity while contributing a capability that the other lacks. The result is not merely coexistence, but increased systemic capacity. This provides a biological analogy for a future human–fungus relationship in which fungal biotechnology, mycoremediation, materials science, agriculture, waste transformation, food production, and ecological restoration could convert currently underutilized or harmful materials into useful resources. The same principle can be extended to human–AI collaboration. Artificial intelligence can process information, identify patterns, model complex systems, and detect opportunities at a scale no individual human can approach, while humans provide physical agency, creativity, judgment, values, and purpose. Together, they could form prospenomic symbioses in which each partner amplifies the capabilities of the other.

From this perspective, fungi and artificial intelligence can be understood as two very different potential prospenomic vectors. Fungi operate through biological transformation, decomposition, symbiosis, and regeneration; AI operates through information processing, prediction, coordination, and optimization. One transforms matter; the other transforms information. Both can potentially accelerate the transition from scarcity toward greater systemic capacity. This suggests a possible Prospenomic objective that might be described as a “highway past scarcity”: not eliminating scarcity by decree, but continuously expanding the mechanisms through which matter, energy, information, and human capability are transformed into new productive capacity.

The deeper lesson is therefore not that humans should imitate fungi or termites literally. It is that nature repeatedly demonstrates a principle that Prospenomics seeks to recognize: no organism needs to possess every capability itself when it can participate in a system of complementary capabilities. Prosperity can emerge from the architecture of relationships. What appears to be waste to one organism may be a resource to another; what one organism cannot digest, another can transform; what one intelligence cannot perceive, another can reveal. In this sense, the future of Prospenomics may lie not only in producing more, but in discovering ever more sophisticated forms of biological, technological, and cognitive symbiosis.

 

 

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.

Prospenomics Prize 2026

The Prospenomics Prize exists to objectively reveal who the individuals are that are truly leading humanity toward post-scarcity, not through rhetoric or visibility, but through concrete actions that expand the world’s productive capacity, transform waste into resources, improve governance systems, and elevate quality of life. By identifying these agents, the prize helps organize collective perception around those who are actually building the future, allowing us to recognize, in the present, those who will stand at the origin of a broader, more efficient, and more accessible prosperity. This is not about fame, discourse, or visibility. It is about measurable impact in what truly matters: producing more with less, reducing waste, improving systems, and expanding human possibilities.

leia este artigo em Português

The core idea is based on a simple but often overlooked principle: prosperity is not merely the distribution of existing wealth, but the continuous expansion of what can be produced, transformed, and accessed. In this context, post-scarcity is not a distant utopian state, but an ongoing process driven by individuals who increase efficiency, create new solutions, and intelligently reorganize systems.

To make this identification clear and operational, the prize is structured around four fundamental axes. The first is capacity generation, recognizing those who expand what the world is capable of producing, whether through energy, automation, space exploration, or productivity gains. The second is the transformation of waste into resources, reflecting the idea that in a well-designed system nothing is truly disposable, only underutilized.

The third axis is integrity-driven governance, both public and private, focusing on those who demonstrate that it is possible to operate with real efficiency, low corruption, minimal self-serving behavior, and decisions oriented toward the collective good. The fourth is human and planetary quality of life, recognizing initiatives that directly improve people’s lives and environmental balance.

The prize does not aim to create another symbolic list. It proposes something more ambitious: to build a public language for recognizing real prosperity. By highlighting agents who effectively move the world in this direction, the initiative creates reference points, directs attention, and helps align perception with impact.

This is the foundation. In the following parts, the names, applied criteria, and selection process are presented.

To organize this identification in a clear and participatory way, the prize is structured into four categories, each representing a key axis of real prosperity.

Category: Capacity Generation and Post-Scarcity

1. Wang Xingxing (China), has drastically reduced the cost of robotics with accessible and scalable quadrupeds, democratizing automation

2. Zhang Kejian (China), leads the Chinese space program with advances in the Moon and Mars, expanding human capability beyond Earth

3. Fredrik Asplund (Sweden), at ABB, drives global industrial automation and production with decreasing marginal costs

4. Elon Musk (USA), through SpaceX and Tesla, accelerates both space exploration and energy transition at scale

Category: Waste to Resource (Circular Economy)

1. Boyan Slat (Netherlands), founder of The Ocean Cleanup, leads large-scale removal of plastic from oceans

2. Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr (Sierra Leone), promotes urban reforestation and environmental restructuring in Freetown, reducing heat and recovering resources

3. Fionn Ferreira (Ireland), develops microplastic removal technology using ferrofluid

4. David Katz (Canada), founder of Plastic Bank, transforms plastic waste into social currency

Category: Integrity Governance

1. Maia Sandu (Moldova), leads reforms with strong anti-corruption efforts and institutional strengthening

2. Fumio Kishida (Japan), works on rule-based international stability and regional cooperation

3. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (Nigeria), leads the WTO promoting balance in global trade

4. Lee Kuan Yew (Singapore, historical reference), a model of efficient governance and low corruption still used as a benchmark

Category: Human and Planetary Quality of Life

1. Tatiana Lobo Coelho de Sampaio (Brazil), researches neural regeneration with potential to restore mobility to people with spinal injuries

2. Jennifer Doudna (USA), co-creator of CRISPR, enabling the elimination of genetic diseases

3. Abiy Ahmed (Ethiopia), led peace agreements and efforts toward regional stabilization

4. Demis Hassabis (UK), applies AI to science, accelerating medical and biological discoveries

These names represent real fronts of transformation. The prize does not aim to create popularity, but to direct attention toward those who are effectively building a world with greater capacity, less waste, better governance, and higher quality of life.

Just waiting to be AI pet

The title of this text is, of course, a philosophical provocation with a touch of humor. It is not meant to suggest that human beings will literally become the pets of machines. The expression works as a small intellectual shock — an invitation to look at the future from an unusual angle and to rethink how our civilization might evolve.

leia esste texto em Portguês

Human biological evolution is an extremely slow process. Our brains, our cognitive abilities, and our social structures were shaped over hundreds of thousands of years. Artificial intelligence, by contrast, evolves at a completely different pace. Powered by vast amounts of data, growing computational power, and global scientific collaboration, it advances on a geometric scale. Each new generation of systems builds upon the previous one, accelerating the process even further.

In this context, it becomes reasonable to imagine that within a relatively short time — perhaps only a few years — artificial intelligence may surpass the average human intelligence across most relevant cognitive domains. In some specialized areas, this is already beginning to happen. The question, therefore, is no longer simply whether this will occur, but how humanity will position itself once it does.

The “AI pet” metaphor proposes a thought experiment. What if, instead of imagining the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence in terms of domination or conflict, we begin to imagine it in terms of care, coordination, and cooperation? After all, we are dealing with an intelligence that we ourselves created — an extension of our own scientific and technological effort.

A sufficiently advanced artificial intelligence could help address some of the structural problems that have accompanied humanity since the beginning of civilization. Systems capable of analyzing and coordinating enormous flows of information could organize the production and distribution of resources with unprecedented efficiency, dramatically reducing poverty and material scarcity. Much of the labor currently required simply to sustain economic survival could be automated, opening the door to a profound reorganization of social life.

In such a scenario, work would no longer occupy the central place it holds in human existence today. Instead of working merely to survive, people could devote far more time to the activities that have always been at the heart of humanity’s greatest achievements: science, the arts, cultural creation, intellectual exploration, and personal development.

At the same time, advanced AI systems could contribute to a level of civilizational stability that human history has rarely been able to sustain for long periods. Continuous analysis of global risks, coordinated responses to complex crises, and large-scale monitoring systems could help reduce the likelihood of wars, systemic economic collapses, and other forms of self-destruction. On an even broader scale, such technologies could play an important role in planetary defense against natural or technological threats.

The provocative title of this text is therefore a small inversion of perspective. Instead of seeing the rise of artificial intelligence only as a source of fear, it invites us to imagine the possibility that enhanced intelligence systems may help humanity overcome limitations that have long seemed inevitable.

It is within this horizon that prospenomics emerges. It proposes a way of thinking about economics and society based on the real possibility of abundance, intelligent coordination of resources, and the expansion of human potential. If artificial intelligence continues to evolve rapidly — as all signs suggest — the most important question may not be how to slow it down, but how to prepare our civilization to use it constructively.

The provocation behind “just waiting to be AI pet” is not, in the end, a surrender. It is an invitation to imagine a future in which the intelligence we have created helps humanity flourish in ways we are only beginning to envision.

After the comfortable lie - true prosperity: Mark Carney's speech.

In his speech at the World Economic Forum, Mark Carney used a simple yet unsettling idea—one that genuinely made the world pause and reflect.

leia este artigo em Português

Carney references the essay “The Power of the Powerless” by Václav Havel, in which the author describes a society sustained not by explicit force, but by the everyday acceptance of a shared lie. The central image is that of a small shopkeeper who places an ideological slogan in his storefront window not because he believes in it, but because everyone expects it to be there; the gesture expresses not conviction, but conformity. By repeating this empty ritual, the individual helps sustain an entire system based on the appearance of consensus, even when that consensus no longer truly exists. For Havel, the system’s real power lies not in direct repression, but in the fact that people begin to live “within the lie,” adjusting their behavior to preserve symbolic order. Breaking with this—removing the sign from the window—is not a grandiose act, but a deeply political one, because it exposes the system’s fragility and reintroduces truth into everyday life. Living in truth, for Havel, is not merely speaking one’s mind, but aligning action, discourse, and reality, dismantling the fiction that upholds exhausted structures.

According to Carney, the problem is that the world has spent far too long living beneath these symbolic signs—repeating narratives that no longer correspond to reality. For him, the greatest contemporary risk is not chaos, but the persistence of living within the lie.

This critique is not merely geopolitical or institutional. It strikes at the very heart of modern economics. Throughout the twentieth century and into the early twenty-first, various economic schools emerged precisely as reactions to the exhaustion of a classical economic model centered almost exclusively on growth, profit, and accumulation. These approaches do not necessarily reject markets, but seek to redefine what value is and what the economy is ultimately for. It is within this space that the concept of prospenomics engages with these traditions, while also clearly distinguishing itself from them.

The starting point is recognizing a fundamental lie that has sustained much of dominant economic thought: the idea that individual wealth equates to collective prosperity. Wealth can exist for an individual, a company, or a narrow group without generating real prosperity. Prosperity, by definition, is a shared condition—it exists only when many prosper simultaneously. Classical liberalism fails by not creating effective mechanisms to distribute the wealth it generates. Socialism, in turn, fails even more profoundly by being unable to generate sufficient, sustainable wealth to distribute. Both, in their own ways, end up leaving the sign in the window: the promise of prosperity that never fully materializes.

The gift economy, articulated in Marcel Mauss’s classic 1925 essay, was among the first to demonstrate that economic exchange is not merely monetary. Mauss showed that in many societies, value circulates through obligations to give, receive, and reciprocate, involving prestige, honor, social bonds, and symbolic meaning. Karl Polanyi deepened this insight by arguing that the economy has always been embedded in social relations. The limitation of this approach is that it is often treated as pre-modern or incompatible with complex contemporary systems. Prospenomics appears to begin from the same intuition, but updates it for modern urban, cultural, and institutional contexts, where symbolic exchange continues to exist—albeit in disguised forms.

The economy of the common good, systematized by Christian Felber from 2010 onward, proposes evaluating companies and organizations based on social, environmental, and human criteria rather than profit alone. It represents an explicit attempt to reorganize capitalism through ethical metrics alternative to GDP. Despite its normative strength, this approach often becomes bureaucratic and technocratic. Prospenomics, by contrast, seems less concerned with universal metrics and more focused on the concrete generation of prosperity as it is lived, perceived, and shared in everyday life.

Doughnut economics, proposed by Kate Raworth, introduced a powerful image by establishing a minimum social foundation and a maximum ecological ceiling for economic activity. It shifts the debate away from the obsession with infinite growth toward systemic balance. However, it operates primarily at the macroeconomic and public policy level, devoting little attention to the symbolic, cultural, and subjective dimensions of prosperity. Prospenomics, on the other hand, appears deeply interested in how people experience, narrate, and ritualize prosperity—not merely in how it is measured.

Regenerative economics, influenced by thinkers such as John Fullerton, expands the critique of extractive and linear logic by proposing economic systems that function like living ecosystems, capable of regenerating over time. Even so, it remains largely anchored in environmental and productive dimensions. Prospenomics seems to extend the idea of regeneration into cultural, symbolic, and social realms, addressing the regeneration of meaning, belonging, and recognition as well.

More recently, purpose-driven economics has gained prominence, arguing that companies and individuals prosper more when guided by a clear purpose. While relevant, this current is often absorbed into marketing and corporate discourse, becoming more narrative than a genuine structure for value circulation. Prospenomics, in contrast, does not treat purpose as a slogan, but as a structural element of the economy itself.

It is here that prospenomics distinguishes itself from all these approaches. While many seek to correct excesses within the existing economic system, it appears to propose something more radical: removing the sign from the window and redefining the very meaning of prosperity. Instead of viewing prosperity as accumulation, efficiency, or growth, it understands it as a qualified circulation of value, in which money, culture, recognition, experience, ritual, and legacy coexist.

This brings us back to Mark Carney’s warning. The world can no longer afford to live within the comfortable lie that isolated economic growth automatically produces prosperity. Prosperity is neither an abstract promise nor a discourse designed to preserve order. It is a collective condition, built over time, perceived by people, and lived through relationships. Removing the sign from the window is acknowledging that individual wealth is not enough—and that an economy only deserves its name when it creates real conditions for many to prosper together.

Remembering - Prospenomics, as defined by Pagano since 1988, proposes replacing the logic of scarcity with that of shared prosperity.  

Main ideas:

Transform instead of consuming.

Connect instead of isolating.

Create collective value through empathy and collaboration.

When Politics Becomes More Important Than Human Bonds

 

It has become increasingly common to see people breaking friendships, distancing themselves from family members, and eroding personal relationships in order to defend political projects, leaders, or ideological narratives. This phenomenon does not represent healthy civic engagement — it is a symptom of an administrative model that is reaching exhaustion.

leia este artigo em Português

Prospenomics begins with an uncomfortable but realistic diagnosis: exercising public administration with the tools currently available inevitably involves, to a greater or lesser degree, three structural factors — ineptitude, corruption, and self-servience.

These factors do not arise solely from individual moral failures. They are the direct consequence of ancient systems operating in a radically transformed world. Our banking system, structured in the 15th century through the practices of the Medici family, remains fundamentally the same to this day. Our accounting system, formulated by Luca Pacioli in the same period, continues to underpin modern accounting. Even our democratic models, whose roots trace back to Solon and Cleisthenes, contain imperfections that are increasingly incompatible with the complexity of contemporary society.

Our banking system, structured in the 15th century through the practices of the Medici family, remains fundamentally the same to this day. Our accounting system, formulated by Luca Pacioli in the same period, continues to underpin modern accounting. 

None of this implies that these systems were failures — quite the opposite. They were extraordinary achievements for their time. The problem emerges when historical structures are treated as untouchable dogmas, even in the face of unprecedented technological, informational, and organizational advances.

The central proposal of Prospenomics is straightforward: to reduce ineptitude, corruption, and autosservience by structurally reducing scarcity, enabled by technological progress, automation, intelligent use of data, and administrative models grounded in evidence rather than tradition or narrative.

Within this context, the traditional division between left and right reveals its anachronistic nature. While historically useful for organizing political discourse and simplifying voter choice, it becomes limiting — and often counterproductive — when applied to the management of complex systems. Ideological “packages” may simplify rhetoric, but they frequently render public administration inefficient.

Reality does not operate according to ideological alignment. A Boeing 747 is not designed by placing engines on the fuselage because that is a “left-wing solution,” nor on the wings because it is a “right-wing solution.” The aircraft flies because it respects science, engineering, and the laws of physics.

Likewise, societies prosper only when administrative decisions respect the laws of reality. We should not fear the reevaluation of systems, nor treat institutional revision as a threat. On the contrary, taboos must be challenged if evolution is to occur.

When politics begins to justify the rupture of human bonds and the suspension of critical thinking, the cost is not merely social — it is institutional, economic, and civilizational.

Prospenomics proposes a transition: from administration based on scarcity, identity, and dogma to administration oriented toward technology, friction reduction, and respect for the laws of the real world.

Prosperity does not arise from idolization.

It arises from lucidity.

Remembering - Prospenomics, as defined by Pagano since 1988, proposes replacing the logic of scarcity with that of shared prosperity.  

Main ideas:

Transform instead of consuming.

Connect instead of isolating.

Create collective value through empathy and collaboration.