<i>“I’d like to study ants,” I said.</i><p><i>He laughed and laughed, as the window blue was turning darker and darker. Finally he regained his composure, sat upright, and asked me seriously:</i><p><i>“Why ants?”</i><p><i>“Ants never fail. Computer networks, I don’t care which one, TYMNET ARPANET INFONET CYBERNET CYPHERNET MICRONET MIDINETTE TELENET they fail regularly, several times a day, somewhere they fail. And the big computers too, you can’t rely on them, sooner or later, they go south and they leave you high and dry, if we’re really going to teleconference on this thing it should never fail. The only thing that never fail are insects.”</i><p><i>“I said, why ants?”</i><p><i>“Look at an ant. Talk about microminiaturization of the ant! Even with the best chips from Silicon Gulch do you know how big a computer would have to be to do all the things an ant does? Tons! Tons! And the ant does all that in its little head and when it finds a twig it has one program: ‘If you recognize something which is long, made of wood, and hard, pick it up and put it on top of the ant-hill.’ Now that I call a program. And if the ant can’t do it by itself, another one will come and help, and another, until they do it. And you can step on them it won’t stop the ultimate result, and a crazy Frenchman named Remi Chauvin who is a genius explained to me how he would put twigs in tall glasses to see what the ants will do and he digs cliffs for them, yet they always manage to complete their program. A computer scientist who doesn’t understand ants is a man who doesn’t know what reliability means.”</i><p><i>“So you would build the computer equivalent of the ant, in hardware?”</i><p><i>“Right, and it would be so cheap, it would have its own little memory and it would have its own little programs, and it would go around looking for places to apply itself, and it would be disposable, disposable computers by the millions, crawling around and keeping their society going no matter what, so we humans can always find one when we need it and make it do something useful, make it work for us.”</i><p>— The Network Revolution: Confessions of a Computer Scientist, Jacques Vallee (1982) <<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=6f8VqnZaPQwC&pg=PA206" rel="nofollow">https://books.google.com/books?id=6f8VqnZaPQwC&pg=PA206</a>>