Plumbers

Plumbers are an unexpected protagonist in the story of human machine collaboration.

They render a utility, on your pipes, in your house – they don’t care about your friends, your friends’ friends and showing anyone their flyers.

They would not want to take your pipes, nor would you shlep your pipes to your plumber. A plumber has no central repository of all piping problems they fixed (although that might actually be useful). And the plumber is not reselling anonymized versions of your pipes.

On a deeper level a plumber is an instantiated form of plumbing. Each plumber is a unique instance of plumbing.
They are an absolutely unique and independent (do not communicate to a central code base of plumbing), they display emergence (2 plumbers might develop a skill, or offering by working together), and don’t rely on any top down guidance.

*In computing this could partially likened to edge computing