Ants are actually quite inefficient workers. Half the time they are going somewhere pointless. But that&#x27;s an acceptable evolutionary trade-off for them and as a whole they can still survive effectively .<p>I don&#x27;t think it is helpful to cast 
  email interaction, comments, phone calls, documentation, 
  and webcast meetings 
as mere &#x27;markers to achieve stigmergy&#x27;. Human beings are capable of far more complex, far higher bandwidth communication than ants, of which all of these are examples. We can, for instance, inform others of a problem and simultaneously let them know someone is already working on it. For the same problem, many ants will flock towards the problem, even if it turns out to be a false alarm or something quickly solved by the first ant to arrive or ...<p>Humans have the ability to immediately convey information about far away (in space or time) places to far away places and to immediately update that information.<p>Perhaps there are things to be learned from ants, but this article does not make it clear to me what that is.