Rating: 
Summary: A rare and exciting find!
Review: In this eloquent book, Steven Johnson conveys a simple principle with profound implications. The idea of "emergence" is subtle to the point of transparency - but like gravity, it influences the behavior of all that we know.
Rating:
Summary: A Good introduction to the world of emergent intelligence
Review: Steven Johnson wonderfully explains how the patterns of complexity can give rise to emergent intelligence. But going beyond just what IS emergence is, Johnson gives examples from nature, human culture, history, and science and technology to show just how powerful emergence is and why we, as a society, need to start thinking "from the bottom up".
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Summary: Emergence transcends...
Review: The only irony in Emergence is that it will not emerge. It is a transcendent book now. It is an instant legend. It is not only a thing of beauty but also of necessity: you need this book. The subtitle will lull you into thinking Johnson is describing the linkages between things, "the connected lives...". But his thoughts, his graceful articulations are descriptions full of poetic and profound insights. They are not reactions; they are calls to action. They have implications. He is writing a new religion.But Johnson's book is not a zealot's. He is a poet with a scientist's tools imbued with a humanist subtlety. There are things that are bigger than humans: there are cities, there are countries, there are ant colonies. There is also sunshine and rain, joy and pain. To understand these things -- to really understand -- is to know how they are connected. It is to understand the "connected lives" of emergence. Johnson makes emergence a part of our lives. He preaches to us without being a preacher. If you listen closely, the sound of Johnson's words will lead you to a new world; a happier, more spiritual world that is in a constant state of improvement.
Rating:
Summary: Intriguing. Full of lots of provocative concepts.
Review: Emergence: the Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software by Steven Johnson is a compelling argument for higher order emergence from aggregates of lower order units. Like Stuart Kaufman's works on self organizing criticality-though a lot more easily understood than the latter- Johnson's discourse points out that order can be produced from apparent chaos when "rules" are in place and when some critical number of individuals interact with one another following these rules. Probably one of the more interesting living systems the author discusses is the slime mold, that unique creature whose cells can act autonomously as individuals or collectively as a unified whole. I'd heard of this phenomenon before, but at that time no underlying cause was given. Johnson notes that their inherently human hierarchical point of view had led researchers to look for pacemaker cells that dictated when, where, and under what conditions cells would form a collective. After years of looking, it became obvious that either no such cells existed or they were very subtly distinguished from the others. According to the author, recent research suggests a more bottom up organization, with individual cells making local decisions about the need to collectivize and using pheromone trails to attract others to them. Interesting too were the descriptions of emergent systems arising unconsciously from human interactions. The reader interested in modern social problems might benefit from the author's discussion of current top down changes in city organization and urban design. The anthropologist or student of mind/brain research might find his discussion of the rise in human awareness and the concept of self through so-called "mind reading" of interest. For myself, as a student of history, I enjoyed some of his perspectives on the rise of cities, "Cities have a latent purpose as well [as a manifest purpose] to function as information storage and retrieval devices....Ideas and goods flow readily within these clusters, leading to productive cross-pollination, ensuring that good ideas don't die out in rural isolation....And the extraordinary thing again is that this learning emerges without anyone even being aware of it (p. 108-109)." The changes that have occurred because of the feedback systems of the internet and the cable industry are also intriguing. Although like many people I've surfed the Amazon.com website, received my "suggestions" for potential purchases, expressed my likes and dislikes of the various books I've read, voted for reviewers whose critiques have help my decisions, and in short become part of a community of similarly minded people, I've not thought about the overall impact that this type of system creates as it spreads to other situations. Johnson makes some very interesting points regarding a bottom up movement in politics and the media and the loss of control by hierarchies. Unconnected, the individual makes little difference, but connected to others of like mind by way of the internet and feed back loops, the collective has power to change a great deal. Probably the most important point Johnson makes is that much of what arises from this higher order emergence is unpredictable. It might be "good" or "bad" from the point of view of a single unit. As with evolution-one of those situations where this type of action is seen-other types of emergence depend upon random decisions and actions of large numbers of individual units, be they ants, software Sims characters, or cities. One can predict that at some critical number of units the system will go through a "phase transition," suddenly becoming something else. Just what else and what impact that change will have on any one individual is impossible to predict. Intriguing. Full of lots of provocative concepts.
Rating:
Summary: Incredible
Review: The best-spent $10 or so of my life. Seriously.
If you are a Software Engineer, or a "Computer Scientist", or you live your life online, you cannot afford to ignore this work, period.
An incredibly lucid, enthralling, and accessible explanation of emergent behavior, swarm intelligence, and self-organizing systems, this book will change the way you think about the Internet, video games, the media, and life, both complex and "simple."
Johnson shows the big picture, where Google fits into the picture, and why Slashdot, Alexa, EBay, and Amazon are significant, in terms of the evolution of the web.
I now truly understand why, while AI is practical (and more pervasive than we realize), artificial sentience is not, and may be impossible altogether. For that matter, I now understand what sentience really is. If software of any kind is of interest to you (or even if it is not), do yourself a favor and let Mr. Johnson show you where it is headed.
Rating: 
Summary: Good introduction, with serious flaws
Review: This book provides a good introduction to the new field of emergence, the study of how complex, apparently "organized" global behaviors arise from the interaction of many autonomous parts operating locally without central control. Steven Johnson explains the principles and brings together many examples from biology (ants, slime molds, neurons) and other areas (games, software, the growth of cities). Unfortunately, Johnson has not made the effort to study his field thoroughly. He is very familiar with game software (e.g., SimCity), but I was shocked to find no mention of the first analysis of emergent behavior. In his classic "The Wealth of Nations" (1776), Adam Smith coined the term "the invisible hand" to describe the seemingly orchestrated order that emerges from the actions of individuals looking for things they need in a free marketplace. Smith's analysis, by the way, is both detailed and profound--a must for anyone interested in the topic of emergence. Also, Johnson seems to wander from his central topic at times, for example in the chapter on mind reading. Despite its gaps and occasional lapses, the book is definitely worth reading. The field is important both socially (do we need a centrally-run society or will the invisible hand work?) and technically. Johnson has done a good job of introducing it.
Rating:
Summary: Great for starting to understand this field
Review: Emergence is a field that is trying to come to grips with how new behavior emerges out of smaller units. For example, there is no gene for a hive of bees or colony of ants, but the behavior of the nest emerges from them. Some people are using cellular automata as a means of explaining higher order behavior (like Wolfram in A New Kind of Science).
The author makes a point that there are 3 main camps of scientific study.
1 - the study of simple systems - 2 or 3 variables, like electromagnetism, or celestial mechanics.
2 - the study of stochastic systems - few million to few billion variables, like actuarial sciences and genetics.
3 - the study of disorganized complexity. Systems in the middle between 3 and a few million, where the second order characteristics - how they interact, is of primary concern.
Deduction and induction work for the first 2 camps, but for the 3rd, the interactions cause actions and reactions which are what scientists politely call counter intuitive, meaning your first thought is wtf!!!??? Or, in other words, it behaves quite differently from what your instincts and (so called) common sense would tell you.
There are 5 basic principles for developing a system (or simulation of one) which can express emergent behavior.
1 - More is different. You get a very different behavior of the system when certain thresholds are reached.
2 - Ignorance is useful. Ants communicate with a vocabulary of around 20 words/ideas.
3 - Encourage random encounters. Much of the behavior of an ant colony comes from them just bumping into each other (or external things like food, or my foot).
4 - Look for patterns in the signs. Even with the limited vocabulary of ants, they can also express things based on the decay in the pheromones they deposit.
5 - Pay attention to your neighbors. Also described as "local information can lead to global wisdom."
The economist Jane Jacobs had been studying things like this for years, and has been demonized by a number of loud, vocal economists: they want to believe in some centralized controlling force (like tax rate or central bank lending rate), control that force, and you control the development of your economic system. People reading her books tend to think she worships sidewalks, instead, she values the communication that can only happen on sidewalks. You can't say "hi" to your neighbors if you are each zipping past each other on the freeway.
One can experiment with emergent behavior with some software tools. The author explains a few, of which you are most likely to have experience with SimCity.
Most memorable quote:
[Marvin] Minsksy scanned the screens for a few seconds, then asked Resnick what he was working on. "I explained that I was experimenting with some self-organizing systems. Minsky looked at the screen for a while, then said, 'but those creatures aren't self organizing. They're just moving toward the green food.'"
"Minksy had assumed that the green blobs were pieces of food placed throughout the turtles' world. In fact the green blobs were created by the turtles themselves. But Minsky didn't see it that way. Instead of seeing creatures organizing themselves, he saw the creatures organized around pieces of food..."
Minsky had fallen for the myth of the ant queen: the assumption that collective behaviot implied some kind of centralized authority - in this case the food was dictating the behavior of the slime mold cells. Minsky assumed that you could predict where the clusters would form by looking at where the food was placed when the simulation began. But there wasn't any food. Nor was there anything dictating that clusters should form in specific locations. The slime molds were self organizing, albeit with parameters that Resnick had initially designed.
"Minsky has thought more, and more deeply, about self organization and decentralized systems than almost anyone else," Resnick writes. "When I explained the rules underlying the slime mold program to him, he understood immediately what was happening. But his initial assumption was revealing. The fact that even Marvin Minsky had this reaction is an indicator of the powerful attraction of centralized explanations.
(pp 167-168)
One of the enduring myths we have is that of the Ant Queen. The myth supposes that there is some central planning done in an ant colony. Instead, the queen exists only to pop eggs out. Male ants have such short lives, that in most species of ants, they have no mouths to eat with - they don't live long enough to get hungry. The production of warriors and workers is done by pheromones in the colony. Where to gather food is performed by random acts of bumping into things. There is no ant which tells another to go lift that bale and tote that barge. It also appears that our intelligence is a by-product of the neural interactions of our brains.
The main difference between chaos theory and emergent behavior theory lies in a couple important differences. A chaotic system has a number of determinable feedback loops, all of which are (usually critically) dependant upon the starting conditions. Emergent behavior has more to do with feedback loops causing totally different behavior, and when some threshhold (usually population) is passed, the nature of the system drastically changes.
Rating:
Summary: Sound and Fury...
Review:
Is emergence a true phenomonon outside of personal experience or a cognitive adaptation solely within personal experience?
This work is a finely told tale of the phenomenon of emergent behavior. How things develop to form something complex not readily apparent from its constituent parts or beginnings. Steven Johnson is thorough, appealing, and clear in his writing. I found this work interesting and engaging. I recommend it to all.
My one criticism of this book is a personal one, not one of error on the author's part. I found this work to be too personality driven. It felt to me to be too much about individual characters and less about ideas. In fact, I think if the actual ideas were distilled from this work the amount would be less than the book suggests. Even with that said, I still think this is a valuable and insightful work.
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Summary: The principles of emergent phenomena explain much in life
Review: As a researcher who studies dynamic systems, the topic of emergent properties is very much of interest to me. The first thing I thought when I read the book was how it applied to so many different phenomena in life. Societies, economies, even psychology and the soul. Yes, the soul - it seems reasonable to me that if we are to postulate the concept of a soul for each of us, could we not look at it as an *emergent* property of our brains? Emergent phenomenon explain much in biology, neurology, genetics and immunology. Give a system many interacting parts, some relatively simple rules for interaction, and voila - a system that behaves in a complex manner despite the underlying simplicity. This book is highly accessible to the layperson and I recommend it to everyone looking for general, guiding principles in understanding life and behavior - including our own. Just read the book and think about how it applies to so many different things. Especially recommended for philosophers and scientists.
Rating:
Summary: Emergence by Steven Johnson
Review: Emergence is when simple elements self organize to form very sophisticated higher level behavior. You do not have to be an information expert to enjoy reading Emergence by Steven Johnson. He has a knack for describing complicated systems in an understandable way.
He compares self organizing behaviors of ants, complex video games, the brain, online communities, cities and slime mode to name a few. The author explains the similarities in a way that the reader ends up with a really extensive understanding of how these bottom up systems form. He discussed in detail how emergence is affecting the Internet. Will computers ever become self-aware? Will they ever learn to think for themselves? After reading this book, it is clear to me if they ever do emergence will definitely be involved.
Steven Johnston wrote a lot about cities and how their emergent behavior creates a well-organized society. For instance most large cities similar distinct areas like gay and affluent neighborhoods. How do these areas form out of millions of individuals? It is amazing if you stop to think about it. It is all part self-organizing, many individuals interacting to form our great cities. Much of this interaction is too difficult to explain but it is fun to think about.
The book is also filled with interesting history and abstract ideas and facts. I never knew that every ant colony has a graveyard and a trash dump! More interestingly they are strategically placed on opposite ends, furthest away from the colony.
This book makes me think about what is in store for our future. It is exciting and a little scary. Will computers form some type of global brain? It is impossible to know what will happen because part of emergence is giving up control and seeing what happens. Fascinating book!
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