A single ant or bee isn't smart, but their colonies are. The study of swarm intelligence is providing insights that can help humans manage complex systems, from truck routing to military robots.
Memetic Algorithms is a population-based approach for heuristic search in optimization problems. They have shown that they are orders of magnitude faster than traditional Genetic Algorithms for some problem domains.
Department of Mathematical Sciences San Diego State University, Vernor Vinge - Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.
T. Fujita, K. Masaki, F. Suzuki, and K. Maenaka. CME 2007: IEEE/ICME International Conference on Complex Medical Engineering, Beijing, China, page 416-420. (2007)