We’ve been bloody well saying this for the past decade! Here and here and several other places besides. Good though to see The Review of Austrian Economics carry this paper — the late Don Lavoie (as did Hayek before him) was the first of the new generation of Austrians to explicitly grasp the concept of stigmergy, though admittedly, he didn’t invoke computational intelligence terminology. Herb Simon said it too! And those three “new” avenues for research are up and running, and maturing quite nicely.
Stigmergy also appears to have been anticipated by Hayek in his discussion of the price mechanism and the question of “how to dispense with the need for conscious control and how to provide inducements which will make the individuals do the desirable things without anyone telling them what to do” (1945, 88 emphasis mine).
This could open new avenues of research, of which I suggested three: optimisation; stigmergy; computational complexity.
manwithoutqualities 