Rating: 
Summary: Best overview of subject I've seen
Review: Johnson is an engaging story teller, and brings together a wide range of material -- interviews, historical data, theory, etc. -- to bring the idea of emergent systems alive. It's enough for the concept to gel for most readers (I suspect) but not so much, or so techie, as to confuse or bore. <...I think Johnson...doesn't fully connect the dots regarding what his subject shows about human society. But this is a minor criticism for what is, after all, a book of science for the layperson rather than a political tract.
Rating: 
Summary: Avoidance and Emergence
Review: I'll be brief: this book barely introduces the reader to the "magic" of Emergence, and it's "plot" is rather boring. Absolutely not a must read.
Rating:
Summary: Emergence by someone who doesn't get it
Review: Mr. Johnson embarked on a quest to explain topics he doesn't know or understand. The first chapters, in which he merely describes the activities and methods that expert scholars use to understand emergence were clear, illustrative and thought provoking. Yet, as soon as the author starts to expand on the concepts introduced, he demonstrates his utter incompetence in the matter.
To put his reasoning in some sort of simple representation, a typical chapter of this book would boil down to :
" Experts say that P then Q. So I understand that X and here is my explanation ..."
In short: The book is formally well written but the author should focus his interest on less scientific matters.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting but not deep
Review: Johnson has his finger on an interesting concept (emergence) that has been sweeping through science for the past decade or so. His analogies are hit-or-miss. Occasionally the book is thought-provoking, but nowhere does he come near to the depth and impact of books like Pinker's "The Language Instinct" or Gleick's "Chaos".Some of the analogies backfired. The games mentioned don't strike me (or many other reviewers, apparently) as particularly compelling. The section on slashdot was also an underwhelming example, especially for those of us who have visited the site (the rating system is a weak form of emergence, and not as useful as Johnson seems to think). A pleasant book, but over-hyped and over-rated.
Rating: 
Summary: This book just didn't connect much for me.
Review: I was excited when I picked up this book, but after reading it I feel it didn't introduce me to anything all that new. The chapters on ants and character recognition were pretty interesting, but everything else was really basic. He didn't back his statements up with concrete details or anything unique. Usually after reading a book like this I come away with a better understanding of the topic. After reading this I can't really say I learned much.
Rating:
Summary: must read for general audience
Review: Steven Johnson does a terrific job introducing a complex, scientific theory to a general audience. My sense is that the less glowing reviews of Emergence have been written by people who already knew about the basic theories behind the concept of emergence. For those of us who have not thought much about networks and bottom-up organization (that is, the majority of readers), this book challlenges us to rethink the world around us. And the writing is strong and lively so that readers who ordinarily don't read about scientific theories are welcomed. I hope the audience for whom this book was written--the poets, the teachers, the commuters, and so on--find this book. In the wake of various books that seek to pin down a theory of everything (including E. O. Wilson's Consilience) and in conjunction with other new books on related topics (including Barabasi's Linked), this book leads readers to interesting ways to understand the big questions about how people, ants, or computers work together without really trying. Emergence suggests various big questions: Who are we as individuals if, together, we form networks with emergent behavior? What exactly is consciousness or intelligence if our brains are defined by emergent behavior? Is power in numbers more complex and even more powerful than we had imagined?
Rating:
Summary: Realworld Examples of Emergence
Review: The book is written around the device of using real-world experiences familiar to all of us as a way of making such topics as chaos theory, complexity, and complex adaptive systems less abstract and more tangible. Two I especially like are: - that the contemporary 'media-sphere'(all the news-outlets) is actually a complex system that is overloaded with positive-feedback and lacks the brakes or baffles of negative feedback. Citing the Gennifer Flower story, he illustrates what happens when positive feedback is unchecked by the mittigating effects of the countervailing forces of negative feedback. - that the city is an information-processing system that captures, encodes, makes persistent and delivers massive amounts of information, allowing man, whose mind evolved to handle the comparatively simple social complexity of Stone Age-era groups consisting of less than 200 people roaming the savannas of Africa, to develop into ever larger communities.
Rating:
Summary: Written by a Novice.
Review: Emergence excited my imagination when I first heard of its scope. Unfortunately, it was written by a non-scientist that did little more than assemble bits and pieces of information about organized complexity. He is not knowledgeable enough in regards to the intricacies of this domain to convince a layman of his ability to lead them into this new science. In short, no new ground was broken or even adequately explored.
Rating:
Summary: A great introduction to organized complexity!
Review: Emergence was a very fast an enjoyable read, using great examples and metaphores to introduce the study of organized complexity. While maybe a little heavy on the software side for some readers, it worked well for me since I grew up playing many of the games he used as examples. I have never seen a better or more eloqent description of human pattern matching than I read in this book, most of it quoted from Ray Kurzweil: -----------------
(Quoted from pages 126-127)
Our brains got to where they are today by bootstrapping out of a primitive form of pattern-matching. As the futurist Ray Kurzweil writes, "Humans are for more skilled at recognizing patterns than in thinking through logical combinations, so we rely on this aptitude for almost all of our mental processes. Indeed, pattern recognition comprises the bulk of neural circuitry. These faculties make up for the extremely slow speed of human neurons." The human mind is poorly equipped to deal with problems that need to be solved serially--one calculation after another--given that neurons require a "reset time" of about five milliseconds, meaning that neurons are capable of only two hundred calculations per second. (A modern PC can do millions of calculations per second, which is why we let them do the heavy lifting for anything that requires math skills.) But unlike most computers, the brain is a massively parallel system, with 100 billion neurons all working away at the same time. That parallelism allows the brain to perform amazing feats of pattern recognition, feats that continue to confound digital computers--such as remembering faces or creating metaphores. Because each individual neuron is so slow, Kurweil explains, "we don't have time... to think too many new thoughts when we are pressed to make a decision. The human brain relies on precomputing its analyses and storing them for future reference. We then use our pattern-recognition capability to recognize a situation as compatible to one we have thought about and then draw upon our previously considered conclusions.
----------------- If you are at all interested in complexity and self-emergent systems, give this book a try. If anything, it will change the way you look at ant colonies, computer games, and the people walking next to you on the sidewalk.
Rating: 
Summary: Shedding Light to Distributed Phenomena in the World
Review: "Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software" explores a very important, yet poorly recognized, phenomenon in the world. Drawing lessons from different distributed systems, the author explains how intelligent behaviors and learning can 'happen' from very simplec omponents. An ant in a colony does not know much about its global environment--it just follows certain simple rules. Yet the whole colony can manage its own structure, allocating a suitable area for each purpose, as if there is a central architect who designed it. Moreover, an individual ant lives for only a year or so, while the colony changes its behavior over its lifetime of 15 years. The ant queen, from all we know, is not in any direct way involved in the colony's evolution. Lessons from the study of ants carry over to other well-known emergent systems. What an ant is to a colony is what a neuron is to a brain, a human to a city, and an individual to an on-line community. The author missed an extremely important example, however: our market economy where resources are organized to produce what individuals need without too much centralized control. Emergent behaviors and learning cannot just occur in any complex system. Certain principles must be satisfied before it can happen. The book explores these in each of the four chapters in its second section: neighbor interaction, pattern recognition, feedback, and indirect control. In the last section, the author explains the 'recommender software', just like what's in operation at Amazon, which combines decisions from many individuals, each with only local, limited knowledge, withp attern-recognition software to recommend items to millions of surfers in an intelligent way. Moreover, the author alludes to the possibility that 'emergence' would be an innovative and powerful way to organize many of existing human systems, political, economic, and others. Overall, this is an insightful and well-researched book. To those already familiar with the concept of emergent behaviors, however, this book might be too basic. Its literary writing style makes the book enjoyable to read, but may obscure some core concepts that can be delivered more succinctly and clearly. Bottom-line: recommended for those not already well versed in the field of emergence.
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