Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software [Paperback]

Steven Johnson (Author)

Book Description

Release date: August 27, 2002 | ISBN-10: 0684868768 | ISBN-13: 978-0684868769

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

A VOICE LITERARY SUPPLEMENT TOP 25 FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR

AN ESQUIRE MAGAZINE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

In the tradition of Being Digital and The Tipping Point, Steven Johnson, acclaimed as a "cultural critic with a poet's heart" (The Village Voice), takes readers on an eye-opening journey through emergence theory and its applications. Explaining why the whole is sometimes smarter than the sum of its parts, Johnson presents surprising examples of feedback, self-organization, and adaptive learning. How does a lively neighborhood evolve out of a disconnected group of shopkeepers, bartenders, and real estate developers? How does a media event take on a life of its own? How will new software programs create an intelligent World Wide Web?

In the coming years, the power of self-organization -- coupled with the connective technology of the Internet -- will usher in a revolution every bit as significant as the introduction of electricity. Provocative and engaging, Emergence puts you on the front lines of this exciting upheaval in science and thought.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

An individual ant, like an individual neuron, is just about as dumb as can be. Connect enough of them together properly, though, and you get spontaneous intelligence. Web pundit Steven Johnson explains what we know about this phenomenon with a rare lucidity in Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. Starting with the weird behavior of the semi-colonial organisms we call slime molds, Johnson details the development of increasingly complex and familiar behavior among simple components: cells, insects, and software developers all find their place in greater schemes.

Most game players, alas, live on something close to day-trader time, at least when they're in the middle of a game--thinking more about their next move than their next meal, and usually blissfully oblivious to the ten- or twenty-year trajectory of software development. No one wants to play with a toy that's going to be fun after a few decades of tinkering--the toys have to be engaging now, or kids will find other toys.

Johnson has a knack for explaining complicated and counterintuitive ideas cleverly without stealing the scene. Though we're far from fully understanding how complex behavior manifests from simple units and rules, our awareness that such emergence is possible is guiding research across disciplines. Readers unfamiliar with the sciences of complexity will find Emergence an excellent starting point, while those who were chaotic before it was cool will appreciate its updates and wider scope. --Rob Lightner --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

To have the highly touted editor of a highly touted Web culture organ writing about the innate smartness of interconnectivity seems like a hip, winning combination unless that journal becomes the latest dot-com casualty. Feed, of which Johnson was cofounder and editor-in-chief, recently announced it was shuttering its windows, which should make for a less exuberant launch for his second bricks-and-mortar title, following 1997's Interface Culture. Yet the book's premise and execution make it compelling, even without the backstory. In a paradigmatic example here, ants, without leaders or explicit laws, organize themselves into highly complex colonies that adapt to the environment as a single entity, altering size and behavior to suit conditions exhibiting a weird collective intelligence, or what has come to be called emergence. In the first two parts of the book, Johnson ranges over historical examples of such smart interconnectivity, from the silk trade in medieval Florence to the birth of the software industry and to computer programs that produce their own software offspring, or passively map the Web by "watching" a user pool. Johnson's tone is light and friendly, and he has a journalistic gift for wrapping up complex ideas with a deft line: "you don't want one of the neurons in your brain to suddenly become sentient." In the third section, which bears whiffs of '90s exuberance, Johnson weighs the impact of Web sites like Napster, eBay and Slashdot, predicting the creation of a brave, new media world in which self-organizing clusters of shared interests structure the entertainment industry. The wide scope of the book may leave some readers wanting greater detail, but it does an excellent job of putting the Web into historical and biological context, with no dot.com diminishment. (Sept. 19) Forecast: All press is good press, so the failure of Feed at least makes a compelling hook for reviews, which should be extensive. A memoir of the author's Feed years can't be far behind, but in the meantime this should sell solidly, with a possible breakout if Johnson's media friends get behind it fully.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Scribner (August 27, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684868768
• ISBN-13: 978-0684868769
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (102 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #148,885 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #46 in Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Physics > System Theory

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

145 of 159 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Reads like a magazine article April 14, 2002

By Dennis Muzza

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This book attempts to explain artificial intelligence in terms of how ant colonies, cities, and modern software operate. If it seems to have the feel of a magazine article, it's because it's not written by a professional in the field but by a professional writer who is a frequent contributor to trendy, popular publications such as Feed and Wired. Although it did not give me the understanding I was looking for about emergence theory, I would not dismiss it completely because it does have a lot of interesting information, as any good magazine article would. It has an overview of Jane Jacobs new urbanism that is both complete and illustrating, it explains how an intelligent kind of feedback makes some web sites successful as virtual communities, and what I found most interesting, how video games are evolving in ways that seem to give them a life of their own. If you are looking for an insightful, deep look at artificial intelligence for the layman, Douglas Hofstadter's "Godel Escher Bach" is still unchallenged. On the other hand if you are looking for a more relaxed, amusing and down to earth approach, filled with cool stuff you can impress your friends with, this book is for you.

553 of 649 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars How not to learn about emergence September 13, 2002

By Edward A. Fagen

Format:Hardcover

Steven Johnson's "Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software" (Scribner, New York, 2001),is a very bad book, shallow, careless, and disappointing. I was lured by its nominal subject, which interests me greatly, and now I'm sorry I bought it. Mr. Johnson is a young- very young- video gamer who has managed to parlay a superficial aquaintance with the vocabulary of modern science into a series of trendy popular books, incomprehensibly praised by such authorities as Steven Pinker and Esther Dyson.
The book opens with a fraudulent pictorial simile, juxtaposing a side view of the human brain and a map of Hamburg ca. 1850. Indeed they do resemble each other, and the reader is supposed to infer (with no help from Johnson) that the resemblance arises from the operation of similar governing principles. Quite apart from the validity of this conclusion, it apparently does not trouble Johnson that the brain is three-dimensional and the city map is essentially two-dimensional, or that the comparison would fail if a frontal view of the brain had been chosen, or if Paris or El Paso or Denver had been chosen instead of Hamburg.
It gets worse. At the most fundamental level, after reading the book I find it impossible to say what the author means by "emergence", his nominal title. When he discusses ant colonies it appears to mean swarm intelligence; when he discusses video games it appears to mean interactive software; at still other places it appears to mean whatever recent developments in the realm of computers or biophysics or city planning that he approves of.
Moreover, he appears to be totally ignorant of all science and mathematics that preceded his own adolescence. Although he has a great deal to say about self-organizing systems, you will search the index in vain for the names of John Conway, Oskar Morgenstern, John von Neumann, Stanislaw Ulam, Stephen Wolfram, or most of the other pioneers of the field. When he does recognize a figure from antiquity (i.e., pre-1970), it is with worshipful adulation. He italicizes the name of Marvin Minsky as if he were a demigod, and finds a book by Norbert Wiener "curiously brilliant". What exactly is the curiosity?- that a brilliant mathematician should write a brilliant book? Likewise, you will find no entry in the index under "Boolean networks" or "cellular automata" or "crystallization" or "ferromagnetism." Under "entropy" you will find only the ludicrous assertion that in nonequilibrium thermodynamics "the laws of entropy are temporarily overcome." In short, Mr. Johnson gives new meaning to the phrase "born yesterday," a degree of ignorance and juvenile solipsism that borders on arrogance.
I note that other reader-reviewers assert that the book will provide lay persons with an introduction to a new science. No, it won't. The only thing it will provide is an introduction to bad science.

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Intelligence (and more) from Unenlighted Little Parts November 19, 2001

By R. Hardy HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

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.