The questions of benefit persist: who and/or what will any system or systems serve? How many are best served? To what extent? In what way? To what purpose? Is benefit only a numbers game of majorities and the art of the possible? There is no reason to believe the cells and filaments of slime mold "care" about their relationships, any more than the cars in a rail system "care" about their significance to a system. At their most basic, living systems are more complex than urban systems by orders of magnitude. The comparison thus becomes largely metaphorical. Most importantly, spectra of political and social inequities should dominate the discussion. In a modern, connected world, I think religous and political ideologies are lesser issues than relative access to wealth and services. If the question "Does this solution serve everyone equally well despite social, economic, and political inequalities?" cannot be answered in the affirmative, then the solution is fundamentally wrong, by definition. Why? Because children are either the primary victims or beneficiaries, and grow to be good citizens in inverse proportion to the pain inflicted upon them by the character of the "system" they must endure.