Rating: 
Summary: disappointing
Review: the theme of this book is quite interesting, and the first few chapters do not disappoint. however, the author starts to drift in the middle section, and loses control completely in the last chapter which resembles a kind of non linear brain dump. the paperback is probably going to provide more value, especially to readers that have read some other stuff on the emergence topic.
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Summary: The "fast food" review of complex adaptive systems (CAS)
Review: Steven Johnson writes well. His analogies, metaphors and phrases all work. But the book itself has very, very little content. Interesting factoid here; tidbit there, but just like fast food, it tastes good but is devoid of any nutrition.
Rating:
Summary: A strong beginning diminishes to a very weak ending.
Review: Johnson' book starts strong, with powerful clear examples of the emergence of complexity from simple organisms. If you are unfamiliar with the concept, this is an excellent introduction. Fortunately, I looked at it in a library before buying it, because he doesn't live up to the promise of his first strong examples. Instead, he drifts off into imaginative dribble about what the web might become, and turns clearity and specificity into vague ninety's hoopla that tells you nothing about emergence, or the web for that matter. The strong examples lead to a real disappointment with the book as a whole.
Rating: 
Summary: Three simple - and very useful - ideas
Review: An interesting book, but not necessarily one in which you need to read every word. In fact, if you skim, speed read, or photo-read - the simple ideas - well, they emerge from the text. Johnson explains the properties of emergent systems - positive and negative feedback loops, neighbor interaction, and pattern recognition. With just these three ideas he describes a range of very interesting behaviors including ant colonies, the development of neighborhoods and cities, genetic algorithms, collaborative filtering and online communities - even games. While somewhat antithetical to strategic business design - exploiting the properties of self-organizing systems can be a very profitable strategy unto itself (witness Ebay) this book should be read by online and offline marketers looking for the next model to replace advertising, as well as product designers, organizational development consultants, community activists, and people who like neat ideas.
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Summary: A popular science type of general introduction to emergence
Review: This book covers the theory of emergence, which states that there within a system of what seems to be anarchy, there are underlying rules that govern the pattern of behaviour and bring order out of chaos.This books serves as an introduction to the field of emergence. It is something that is already happening around us, but we usually cannot see. The reason for this is that you need to look at a higher level then the individual organism. Ants can not see the society as a whole that they are members of. Just as we humans may have an understanding of the local community we are in and of ourselves, we need to step outside (or above) the city to understand how it functions. A city, like an ant colony does not have rules from the top as such, but rules that each occupant obeys, and it is these rules that give order to the chaos and make the resultant community behave like an organism as a whole. As I read the book though, an uneasiness came upon me, just as I do when reading books on neo-Darwinism. There is no mention of where these rules as such come from except through evolutionary survival or initial chance. If anything, he implies that we are in a universe that had the initial conditions set, and left running. So we'd evolve or grow into who or what we are. The idea that a God figure could be there, tweaking the parameters as the model runs, or even setting the initial conditions works against his ideas. This view is however explored in the chapter Control Artist, where he comments on the development of software models, notably computer games. Games such as SimCity are discussed where the rules are set, but as a player we get to choose what gets built, what gets destroyed. Although here we are playing the Mayor of the City, the notion is the same; we control the macro level and not the micro level. But at the micro level, the software developer who built the game in the first place controls each inhabitant. Nothing really, is left to chance. Given the exact same initial conditions and same set of instructions the computer will create the same environment. So, like most popular science books currently available it will educate you, entertain you and keep you occupied whilst reading it. But it is not a book of philosophy to base a life on, which thankfully, the author has not tried to provide. It is very well researched, and the author seems on top of current trends and ideas. His writing style jumps around quite a bit, and some of the connections between topics might seem a little far fetched but it is an entertaining read as an introduction to the field of emergence theory.
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Summary: Intelligence (and more) from Unenlighted Little Parts
Review: If you see an ant, you pay it little attention. It's the lines of ants that are really fascinating, and the colonies that really get things done. An ant by itself is not only a speck, it is a humble one, capable of little. It isn't just a matter of getting a lot of ants together so that by sheer numbers they multiply what one ant can do. Ants organize. They communicate. They have tasks, they assign workers, they shift assignments as old jobs get done and new ones come up. We have tried to understand this sort of organization in our own way. To get such things done ourselves, we would have to have a leader and subleaders, and in trying to understand ants, we even attributed to the queen of the ant colony a sort of CEO status. She isn't, of course; she is an egg-laying machine, but she is deep in the darkest parts of the colony, and has no idea about what her workers are doing or how to respond to quality assurance suggestions. She is not the chief of the bureaucracy of the ant colony. Something else is. Who is giving the orders? No one. The ants are self-organizing, according to Steven Johnson, whose bright book _Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software_ (Scribner) is obviously not just about ants. Ants are just an easy example. Johnson's book is full of satisfying analogies. Take your brain, for instance. Those neurons don't know anything. Each one is capably of firing when stimulated, and that's about it. "No individual neuron is sentient," Johnson writes, "and yet somehow the union of billions of neurons creates self-awareness." Adam Smith posited an "invisible hand" which set the prices in economic systems, some supply and demand force that was completely free of any sort of conscious human control (just as the slime cells didn't have a higher authority). It wasn't planned, it just happened because of the number of independent actors on the economic stage. The immune system possessed by each of us gets smarter over the years as its biochemical parts share information, and it responds with individualized defenses, but it isn't conscious and it has no memory. The host and hostess of that last party you went to didn't decree that everyone would gather in the kitchen, but it happened anyway. Though cities may have a government, no one has told them to set up offices in the center, and branch off into suburbs and malls around them, and no one designed individual neighborhoods to be havens for artists or for homosexuals. The silicon circuits in a handheld computer can't do much but flop on and off, but they can learn your handwriting with remarkable skill. Other electronic stupids at Amazon.com can tell from what you have ordered what might appeal to you in the future, and offer up "your" selections with much more skill than an ad designed for everyone could possibly do. Emergence is being used in video games, and undoubtedly will be a larger part of the software we interact with every day. There have, up to now, only been primitive and clumsy attempts to allow web sites and browsing to feed back on themselves in some emergent fashion to give users quicker access to just the site they had been long looking for. Couch potatoes, too, would make great ants, since there are so many of them and they could be simply connected with minimal feedback systems, with emergent miniseries and music videos as a result. When Johnson enters the ring as a prophet, one can only allow that his schemes might come to pass and we will have to wait and see. But in explaining a natural system (followed by a technological one) which has been present since before our neurons organized themselves but which has been appreciated by that organization only in the last few decades, Johnson displays enthusiasm and didactic skill. Some are hailing his book as a milestone on the path to the future, and maybe it is, but perhaps more important, it is an exhilarating and instructive course in a current trend of thought.
Rating: 
Summary: Intro to Self-organizing systems
Review: Unfortunatey, I was underwhelmed. This might be a good first read on the subject, especially if you are interested in city dynamics and software. It would have made a great magazine article of 10-15 pages.
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Summary: So What's New?
Review: I read the manuscript of this at the start of the year, attracted by the author's cv as a wunderkind of the new technology, then riding the crest of a wave on his website Feed where like minds came together to make the world a better place. The resultant book, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software (you can smell the prognosis in the subtitle - it's already gone off) was published last month. Feed went belly up in the summer. The market had spoken: "Feed, you are the weakest link. Goodbye." Walter Benjamin and Theodore Adorno, the harbingers of post-modernism, had a similar notion they called 'constellations'. Far from this idea being so revolutionary it's about to change the world, it is in fact so bloody ordinary. God understood the principle of emergence (He would, wouldn't He?). When He agreed to let Israel have a king (1 Samuel 10: 19) His heart wasn't in it. Consequently Saul was very bad news. (He was replaced by David, Joseph's descendant, and a poet/psalmist, someone you could trust). Put another way: emergence is normal. Just take a minute to think what management has done for us politically, personally and corporately. See what I mean?
Rating: 
Summary: Good overview of technology tainted by weird politics.
Review: As I read Steven Johnson's descriptions of emergence and its scientific foundations, I was motivated to read the whole book in one sitting. It was that interesting. But somewhere, about half way into the book, Mr. Johnson took a weird detour into politics. It occurred in his description of unhealthy "positive feedback." As I read his overview of this phenomena, I was surprised that he used Bill Clinton's troubles with his various female relationships as proof positive that an unregulated press took these stories to an unhealthy level, thus confirming "positive feedback." I did not follow his logic here and I am sure many more partisan than myself would conclude just the opposite - that the press was indeed too forgiving of Clinton behavior. But what does this controversy have to do with emergence? Unfortunately, this wedging of the controversial Bill Clinton into a predominately sterling account of the science of emergence, forced me to question all previous and subsequent emergence descriptions that Mr. Johnson provided. Too bad.
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Summary: this is a book for 'the rest of us'
Review: Richard (most recent reviewer) : at the risk of seeming gushy, this was a great book ---but not for the technically expert. As one who subscribes to (but never reads) the journal 'Artificial Life' I can attest to the value of this stimulating introduction. Johnson not only depicts palpable instances of swarm intelligence (beyond the familiar ant colony example) but adds a number of insights....so goes beyond simple popularization. For comparison, skim Candace Pert's "Molecules of Emotion". She goes way over the top in the last half of the book, adding a messianic-holistic urge to the initial thesis that human intelligence may be 'distributed' beyond the brain. Yes, it's true that "when all is said and done, more is said than done". As a reader with moderate knowledge of her field , I found Dr. Pert exceeding permissable limits. But the first half made me think hard. And, at day's end, isn't this the intent of any author?
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