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Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (Paperback)

~ Steven Johnson (Author) "It's early fall in Palo Alto, and Deborah Gordon and I are sitting in her office in Stanford's Gilbert Biological Sciences building, where she spends..." (more)
Key Phrases: emergent software, swarm logic, mold simulation, New York, Gennifer Flowers, Por Santa Maria (more...)
3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (90 customer reviews)
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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 the Hardcover edition.

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 the Hardcover edition.
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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 5.5 x 0.7 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (90 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #25,067 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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    #8 in  Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Physics > System Theory
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Steven R. Johnson
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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First Sentence:
It's early fall in Palo Alto, and Deborah Gordon and I are sitting in her office in Stanford's Gilbert Biological Sciences building, where she spends three-quarters of the year studying behavioral ecology. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
emergent software, swarm logic, mold simulation, slime mold cells, younger colonies, emergent intelligence, emergent systems, number sorting, harvester ants, urban explosion, organized complexity, individual ants, older colonies, pheromone trails, climax stage, emergent behavior, ant colonies
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New York, Gennifer Flowers, Por Santa Maria, Connection Machine, Will Wright, Bell Labs, Jane Jacobs, Middle Ages, Mitch Resnick, Norbert Wiener, Danny Hillis, Gerald Edelman, Jim Wooten, Oliver Selfridge, Alan Turing, Deborah Gordon, Los Angeles, Marvin Minsky, Ponte Vecchio, Warren Weaver, World Wide Web, Krush Kringle, Left Bank, Paul Krugman, West Village
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111 of 122 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Reads like a magazine article, April 14, 2002
By Dennis Muzza (Monterrey, Mexico) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (Hardcover)
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.
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503 of 584 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars How not to learn about emergence, September 13, 2002
This review is from: Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (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.
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37 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars Mediocre At Best, January 30, 2002
By Rebecca Bryant (Fayetteville, AR USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (Hardcover)
Johnson has a riveting introduction and opening but the rest of the book falls flat with a superficial treatment of emergence. The author would also have the reader think that he knows alot about cities and their development, but his actual understanding of the subject is very, very thin.

Try "Signs of Life" by Richard Sole and Brian Goodwin for a much better elucidation of complexity science and the role of emergence. Another book just out is "Self Organization in Biological Systems" published by Princten University Press as part of its series on complexity science.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars Fact checking
I've only read the first chapter so please ignore the 3-star rating; Amazon requires one. I just wanted to point out one error. Read more
Published 1 month ago by B. Keim

5.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating must read- will really get your brain buzzing!
I love this book! Who would have thought that slime mold, ants, cities, software, our immune systems, and other complex systems have so much in common- the author does a great job... Read more
Published 1 month ago by Dan Burleigh

1.0 out of 5 stars Barely About Emergence
The first part of the book is an adequate introduction to the concept of emergence, while the rest reads like a drawn out futurist essay. Immensely shallow. Read more
Published 6 months ago by Eric Westover

3.0 out of 5 stars I hope you like slime mold
First, I hope you like ants and slime mold. That is how the book starts. The surprise is that this is a good start. Read more
Published 6 months ago by Bill

2.0 out of 5 stars Patterns In Imagination
Written during the height of the late Tech Bubble, it often seems to have more faith, in a secular way of course, in the imagined promises of technology in general and software in... Read more
Published 8 months ago by Chuck Brooks

3.0 out of 5 stars Not enough emergence
I was prepared to like this book since it deals Emergence, a subject I'm interested in. Some parts of this book are relevant, such as stories about ants, slime molds, Starlogo,... Read more
Published 11 months ago by Campegius Bronkhorst

5.0 out of 5 stars I love this book. It's now one of my favorites
I love the analogies that he uses and how he analyzes ant colonies. He makes a pretty good case to show how collective intelligence is what moves mountains, not any one person's... Read more
Published 11 months ago by J. Silva

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Book
I read this about a year ago and purchased a copy for my girl friend. Very interesting and insightful perspective on life and organization.
Published 16 months ago by Thomas H. Repasky

4.0 out of 5 stars Nice soft intro to concepts of self-organisation
For those with a technical interest in the matter, this is a nice soft intro to the topics with which concerned. Read more
Published 19 months ago by Kannan Shah

4.0 out of 5 stars Emergence - The Study of Macro-behavior resulting from Micro-level Agents.
The property of "emergence" is essentially the top-level or macro-level view of the behavior or intelligence of a system. Read more
Published 21 months ago by William J. Romanos

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