Biology has a lot to teach us here.

Millipedes actually have pretty simple neural organization, each body segment has input from the segments in front and behind. So the 'brain' needs only to choose the direction and everything else follows along.

Ant, termite and bee colonies actually have fairly simple behavior patterns on the individual level. Each animal signals its immediate neighbors in a relatively limited language, but the colony as a whole displays very effective behavior built from the simple individuals.

It seems that many IT folks are psychologically 'top down' people (possibly because they were attracted to computers as the ultimate in controllable machines) and have a hard time 'letting go'