Every now and then I start reading and realize "this book is going to change how I think."

Its a little bit scary and a lot of bit exciting.

While I know--I know--I picked this up because I thought it was about disease, Emergence has proved far more interesting and satisfying than I could hope. Emergence's premise is about networks and 'organized' behavior that develops from a lower-level to a more sophisticated one. In one sense, this is a very real snapshot of the history of thinking/science captured in a book, no less pertinent for its publication date. We have been coming out of the ages of hierarchy and webs from how we explain and understand the universe, from biology to political systems. Now there is a new type of explanation. From looking at how disorganized individuals spring up into a larger, organized whole, he explains slime mold, ants selecting new colony sites, video games, and grassroots political revolutions.

He is one of those rare science writers that sees across disciplines and speaks intelligibly about all of them.

A good read, but hard to get super excited about it as his thinking/writing on these topics has continued to evolved. I recommend his later books much more. ( )

In the preface, I defined emergence as simply as possible: order arising out of chaos. A more nuanced definition is higher-order complexity arising out of chaos in which novel, coherent structures coalesce through interactions among the diverse entities of a system. Emergence occurs when these interactions disrupt, causing the system to differentiate and ultimately coalesce into something novel.Key elements of this definition are chaos and novelty. Chaos is random interactions among different entities in a given context. Think of people at a cocktail party. Chaos contains no clear patterns or rules of interaction. Make that a cocktail party in which no single culture prevails, so that no one is sure how close to stand to others, whether to make eye contact, or whether to use first or last names. Emergent order arises when a novel, more complex system forms. It often happens in an unexpected, almost magical leap. The cocktail party is actually a surprise party, and everyone knows where to hide and when to sing “Happy Birthday.”

Emergence produces novel systems—coherent interactions among entities following basic principles. In his bestseller Emergence, science writer Steven Johnson puts it this way: “Agents residing on one scale start producing behavior that lies one scale above them: ants create colonies; urbanites create neighborhoods; simple pattern-recognition software learns how to recommend new books.”1 Emergence in human systems has produced new technologies, towns, democracy, and some would say consciousness—the capacity for self-reflection. ( )

It's been quite a while since I read this, and I should probably queue it up for a re-read. But at the time I read it, it opened my mind to a lot of ideas that I was ready for, but hadn't quite known how to put together. It might even seem quaint and dated now, but this book, along with a few others like GEB, really put me on the track of investigations and readings I've been pursuing ever since. It was one of those books that I read and then closely scanned the bibliography to find out what else I should read. Thank you, Mr. Johnson. ( )

I came across this book while browsing the stacks at my local library. Although written in 10 years ago, I found the concepts to be relevant still today. The author covered a wide range of topics from ants to city planning to game theory to music through which he wove the ideas of emergent behavior, negative feedback, distributed intelligence, patterns and rules. It was a fun and worthwhile read about topics that I find fascinating.

Of particular interest was the end of the book about consciousness. I was not familiar with the other minds theory of consciousness which essentially suggests that our ability to consider how a situation appears to another led to our self-awareness. The study with 3 and 4 year olds that drove this point home was particularly interesting as it underscores how the mind develops and becomes self-aware.

As a Web developer, I began to wonder if the Web could become emergent. I came to the conclusion that it's not possible in its current state. It needs more structure and is inherently disorganized due to its architecture. According to Johnson, the key missing ingredient is feedback- no web page knows what other pages are pointing to it without effort. All connections are one-way. I suspect this lack of two-way connections is why Google, and search engines in general, are so dominant. We literally could not effectively use the information on the Web without these tools today. ( )

This is incredibly engaging and interesting, and is confirming ideas about which I already had some inklings about the general outlines of. I think that emergence may well shape up to be the defining idea of the next few decades. It seems to have its tentacles in a lot of different and disparate fields and problems, at any rate. I want to know more, though this is an excellent starting point. ( )

I am fascinated by the concept of emergence, where simple sets of rules applied to large-scale systems can result in complex high-order organization, the most famous being an ant colony, where simple pheromone signals feed back on themselves to create what appears to be a well organized whole. I was expecting something a bit more technical, like a popular account of the current state of research, but he spent a lot more time talking about emergence in general and where it shows up in our lives and in the world around us. I did find the last couple chapters very fascinating, though, where he talked about emergence in the online community. As I was reading it (in July 2010), there were several things he talked about as possibilities that are now taken for granted, like what would become Google's search ranking algorithms, Netflix's movie suggestions and direct streaming, social networking, and other crowd-sourcing sites. About halfway through the chapter I looked at the publication date because of this and was pretty shocked to see that it was 9 years old.

All in all not a bad book, but not quite what I was expecting or looking for. ( )

thought provoking read on self-organzing behaviors & the "bottom-up" revolution going on theories of how we connect. interesting to note that he wrote this after moving to greenwich village and then reading jane jacobs' "the death & life of great american cities" parallel w/ reading about brains. i love his magpie mind that can combine stuff on ant colonies, sidewalk culture, neuroscience, recommendation software of amazon, and social networks. "Cities bring minds together and put them into coherent slots."
tags: self-organizing behavior, swarm logic, clustering, feedback loops, pattern recognition, emergent software, ordered randomness, jane jacobs, theory of minds, bottom-up revolution (8.20.09) ( )

This is a very readable popular science book about how complex systems emerge from lower level behaviour. It covers slime mold, ants, cities, the Internet and the human brain. It was written in 2002 and the Internet section felt qite outdated, but I really enjoyed the sections about cities, and how neighbourhoods develop. I liked the idea of cities as a giant communal database for information collection, storage and retrieval. ( )

As of late, “Emergence” seems to be the hottest buzz word tossed around the crit spaces and seminar rooms of my chosen discipline. Thus it was important that I finally read something about just what the hell the term means. As usual, the unflagging Johnson never fails to enthrall. Who can deny the power of such observations as, “in the case of the Middle Ages, we can safely say that the early village residents shat themselves into full-fledged towns.”? He occasionally descends into the hackneyed territory of predictive cyber-nerd-speak, but he quickly segues into something else in his quest to uncover a consilience among ants, brains, Jane Jacobs, and the World Wide Web (apparently not invented by Albert Gore, but one Tim Berners-Lee. Coincidentally I voted for Tim in 2000).

Alas, this book seems to shore up my preconceived opinion that “emergence” will have little more than a tenuous relationship with some student’s “architecture” project for a Museum of Humanism in a previously Iron Curtainized locale. It’ll merely be used as one of those dialogic Red Herrings that make me look like the ass when I point out that the project lacks stairs… and walls. I suppose those things will emerge later on. ( )

Steven Johnson is an excellent pop culture / business writer. Emergence is up to the high standard set by his Everything Bad Is Good For you. Everything will be easier to digest for most. Everything deals with readily accessible pop culture. Johnson's fascinating thesis in Everything is we are smarter due to pop culture. Emergence is more remote concentrating on history of emergence theory in ants and bees. Johnson builds a bridge between our most massive emergent system, the web, and nature. His foundation is solid, but he demurs at the last moment for some good reasons. Turns out there are differences between nature's emergent systems and the web. As a "thought experiment" this book helps see and think of web movement differently. Johnson's abstract comparison between biological and technical systems is what makes Emergence fascinating and layered. I am working notes into a database and it is taking several days. ( )

Steven Johnson is an excellent pop culture / business writer. Emergence is up to the high standard set by his Everything Bad Is Good For you. Everything will be easier to digest for most. Everything deals with readily accessible pop culture. Johnson's fascinating thesis in Everything is we are smarter due to pop culture. Emergence is more remote concentrating on history of emergence theory in ants and bees. Johnson builds a bridge between our most massive emergent system, the web, and nature. His foundation is solid, but he demurs at the last moment for some good reasons. Turns out there are differences between nature's emergent systems and the web. As a "thought experiment" this book helps see and think of web movement differently. Johnson's abstract comparison between biological and technical systems is what makes Emergence fascinating and layered. I am working notes into a database and it is taking several days.

This is an excellent thought provoking book that I thoroughly enjoyed, and provides a good introduction to the topic of emergence dealing with the bottom-up creation of intelligent behaviour from lower level less intelligent behaviour.

This is perfectly illustrated by the example of harvester ants whose colonies exhibit intelligence and learning that no individual ant possesses. The complexity of the colony and its structure is constructed by the behaviours of ants whose vocabulary extends to only ten discrete actions. In a real sense the ants do not consciously create the colony but it is created through the interactions between the ants. There is no helicopter view of the colony held by any ant, no master plan, yet the colony is created. It emerges from the lower level actions of the ants.

Interesting though the behaviour of ants is, the book goes on to cite many other examples much closer to home, not the least of these is the creation of cities which is shown to parallel this emergent approach.

The book explores how our mindset makes it difficult to see and accept the creation of complex intelligent behaviour in this emergent way. Our thinking tends to look for a top-down leader driven explanation, the bird in the flock that sets the direction, rather than each bird in the flock following a simple set of rules with the flock behaviour emerging as a consequence.

For me the book provided real insights into the prevalence of emergent systems and points to computer games such as Sim City which allow us to glimpse the creation and operation of emergent worlds.

Whilst the book roams across a broad canvass discussing the behaviours of cities, ants, slime mould, software, the internet and politics as emergent systems, it does not focus specifically on business organisations. However to the discerning reader the profound importance of the message of emergence and its implications will resonate in every business.

This is an excellent and stimulating read that introduces the principles of emergence and may change the way you look at how a host of systems operate including those involved in business operation and business change. ( )

'Emergence' is certainly a good primer to the topic, written in a quite accessible style. Unfortunately, Steven Johnson describes at length ant behavior and city development (among many other processes), but he generally fails to give necessary insight into possible underlying mechanisms. ( )

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (2001) by Steven Johnson is a fun and fascinating book that explores self-organizing systems from slime molds to software. Debunking "The Myth of the Ant Queen," Johnson tells of the research done in urban studies, neuroscience, and computer games that shows that there is no need for a leader or "pacemaker" to get things going. Don't make me explain the science but I do reccomend reading the book.

Here's an article from The New York Times on the swarming instinct (Nov. 13, 2007) that may be related (via MetaFilter).
Favorite Passages

According to the gospel of Death and Life, individuals only benefit indirectly from their sidewalk rituals: better sidewalks make better cities, which in turn improve the lives of the city dwellers. The value of the exchange between strangers themselves. The sidewalk exist to create the "complex order" of the city, not to make the citizens more well-rounded. Sidewalks work because they permit local interactions to create global order. - p. 96
The neighborhood system of the city functions as a kind of user interface for the same reason that traditional computer interfaces do: there are limits to how much information our brains can handle at any given time. We need visual interfaces on our desktop computers because the sheer quantity of information stored on our hard drives -- not to mention on the Net itself -- greatly exceeds the carrying capacity of the human mind. Cities are a solution to a comparable problem, both on the level of the collective and the individual. Cities store and transmit useful new ideas to the wider population, ensuring that powerful new technologies don't disappear once they've been invented. But the self-organizing clusters of neighborhoods also serve to make cities more intelligible to the individuals who inhabit them -- as we saw in the case of our time-traveling Florentine. The specialization of the city makes it smarter, more useful for its inhabitants. And the extraordinary thing again is that this learning emerges without anyone even being aware of it. Information management -- subduing the complexity of a large-scale human settlement -- is the latent purpose of a city, because when cities come into being, their inhabitants are driven by other motives, such as safety or trade. No one founds a city with the explicit intent of storing information more efficiently, or making its social organization more palatable for the limited bandwidth of the human mind. That data management only happens later, as a kind of collective afterthought: yet another macrobehavior that can't be predicted from the micromotives. Cities may function like libraries and interfaces, but they are not built with that explicit aim. - p. 108-109
The Web may never become self-aware in any way that resembles human self-awareness, but that doesn't mean the Web isn't capable of learning. Our networks will grow smarter in the coming years, but smarter in the way that an immune system or a a city grows smarter, not the way a child does. That's nothing to apologize for -- an adaptive information network capable of complex pattern recognition could prove to be one of the most important inventions in all of human history. Who cares if it never actually learns how to think for itself? - p. 128
One last note: the names of E.O. Wilson and Jane Jacobs keep coming up in my readings, so I really ought to find some of their works to read. ( )

I borrowed this book from the UNC library along with 'No Logo' and 'Success of Open Source'.

I had worked my way through those two books, but ignored this one.

Eventually, I decided if I checked this book out, I should make an attempt to read it.

I was done with it in a couple of sittings.

A pretty good read. ( )

Pros: good overall coverage of the subject; an easy and quick read
Cons: lack of depth; very journalistic style; lack of insights and more thought-provoking material ( )

It takes a rare talent to make a Luddite-leaning English major like myself become utterly fascinated by a) slime molds and b) computer programming. Not only that, but I understand it. Don't walk, folks. Run. (But please pay for the book first, ok?)
-- Posey

An interesting discussion of community relationships. The idea of bottom up emergence was intriguing. The best part of the book to me was the discussion of software evolution. ( )

Emergence is the ability of low-level components to self-organize into a higher-level system of sophistication and intelligence. Known by many names - collective phenomenon, bottom-up behavior, self-organization, and decentralization - it is a fascinating phenomenon that Steven Johnson approaches from numerous angles...read full review ( )

This is really fascinating stuff, and the kind of thing I have been dipping into for a while. Though I found this book a little bit shakey to start with, it soon picks up the page-turning momentum of a good thriller.

Steven Johnson takes us on a journey through self-organising systems as different as slime moulds, businesses in medieval Florence and eBay. The unexpected emergent behaviour of systems based on simple rules is a bizarre and fascinating subject (at least to me). Emergent effects, ranging from traffic jams to human consciousness itself, affect us in all aspects of our lives.

This book shows a very different viewpoint to the way things really work. The emergent behaviours of societies and social networks is particularly interesting, and is demonstrated very well with examples taken from the internet, such as slashdot and eBay.

In common with chaos theory and quantum mechanics, the science of emergent systems shows that the more we discover and understand the rules and mechanisms behind the universe, the less we are actually able to predict what will happen. The world will alway be able to suprise us - I actually find that quite heartening! ( )

Excellent. Like having your view of the world shifted. ( )

NF