Hi,
I was thinking about how our society incentivizes behaviors by a collection of free individuals, so that the work of those individuals fulfils the requirements of the society as a whole. For example, people contribute by working, earn money, and use that money to gain a fair share of the contributions of others. It works for the most part ... but you need police to prevent people from stealing, etc. which allows people to unfairly share in the contributions of others without contributing.
Marvin Minsky had a book "Society of Minds" which may have developed some ideas along these directions. And their were the older ideas in neural nets about emergent behavior, cellular automata, etc. And recently there is work on cooperative agents etc.
However, I don't think anyone has designed a large system of high-granularity agents that are designed to work and evolve as a total system (i.e. different roles for homeostatis like police etc.). Do you know of any work along these lines?