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Kevin and Debra Rollins Center for eBusiness - Emergence
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Emergence

Emergence

The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
Steven Johnson

Reviewed by D. Richard Dance, CPA, President/CEO of UPchannels, and Ann H. Jenkins, Office Manager

October 2002

Steven Johnson's Emergence is an in-depth look at how simple components become increasingly complex and develop familiar behavior patterns. Unlikely subjects such as slime molds, ants, cities, and brains are carefully examined.

For those that haven't given much thought about bottom-up organization, this book explains how people and computers work together to establish patterns and structures without really consciously trying.

Premise of the Book

An individual ant can't do much, see much, or communicate much by itself. However, if you get a bunch of ants together spontaneous intelligence emerges. Johnson's book details the development of increasingly complex and familiar behavior among simple components. The ones he chooses to detail in his book are: slime molds, ants, cities, and brains--of software developers.

Organization of the Book

The book is divided into three parts :

Part One

  • Myth of the Ant Queen
Part Two
  • Street Level
  • The Pattern Match
  • Listening to Feedback
  • Control Artist
Part Three
  • The Mind Readers
  • See What Happens

Author of the Book

Steven Johnson was the co-founder of Feed, which was one of the Internet's acclaimed voices on technology, science, and culture--until it went under. Newsweek named him one of the "50 People Who Matter Most to the Internet." Steven wrote Interface Culture, a book that found enthusiastic reception among web folks who appreciated its theme that "the wired culture was creating new metaphors for ways to see the larger world."

Excerpt from the Book

The following is an excerpt from the book :

"There's nothing hierarchical about the way an ant colony does its thinking. . . the queen is not an authority figure. She lays eggs and is fed and cared for by workers. She does not decide which worker does what. . . It would be physically impossible for the queen to direct every workers decision about what task to perform and when. The harvester ants that carry the queen off to her escape hatch do so not because they've been ordered to by their leader . . . it's in the colony's best interest. . . to keep the queen safe. In other words, the matriarch doesn't train her servants to protect her, evolution does.
Witness the authoritarian colony regime in the animated film Antz – but in fact, colonies are the exact opposite of command economies. While they are capable of remarkably coordinated feats of task allocation, there are no five-year plans in the ant kingdom."

In each of these systems, agents residing on one scale start producing behavior that lies a scale above them; ants create colonies, urbanites create neighborhoods. Steven Johnson goes on to discuss how a media event takes on a life of its own, and how new software programs may produce an intelligent worldwide web.

Four Stages of Emergence

Steven believes that there are four stages to emergence.

  • 1st Stage = People work on a problem without realizing they are working on the problem.
  • 2nd Stage = Fields and people start to understand the connection between things.
  • 3rd Stage = People start building things in conscious awareness of the laws of emergence.
  • 4th Stage = Computer networks start having an emergent mind of their own.

The fourth stage is simply a conjecture at this time.

My Conclusion

Most people will probably believe the slime molds/ants examples, but feel less inclined to believe that cities and software developers organize quite that way.

For those who have studied emergence, swarm intelligence, and self-organizing systems this book will probably not add much to your knowledge and should not be purchased.

For those who have not given much thought about networks of people and bottom-up organization, this book helps you understand how ants, people, and computers seem to work together to establish patterns and structures without really consciously trying. For those that fall into this category the book would be useful to purchase.

Where to Obtain the Book

The book can be purchased directly from the following companies :

  • Amazon.com www.amazon.com [Hardcover] | $17.50 [Paperback] | $11.20
  • Barnes and Noble www.bn.com Steven Johnson/Simon & Schuster Trade [Paperback] /August 2002 | $12.60; [Hardcover] Schribner/September 2001 | $20.00
  • Booksamillion www.bamm.com [Hardcover] | Regular price $18.62, Club price $16.76

Standard Information about UPchannels

UPchannels focuses on delivering five primary services:

  1. Provides hope for information overload through Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) training and seminars for individuals, families, and organizations.
  2. Offers the CRM Researcher's Directory through Bob Thompson's CRMGuru.
  3. Serves as Knowledge Management editor for the Open Directory Project on the Internet.
  4. Creates XBRL Financial Reporting knowledge bases and training for CPAs and companies.
  5. Does special projects and marketing whitepapers for growth oriented software vendors.

For more information on UPchannels visit their website at www.upchannels.com

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