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
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.
Johnson makes sense of the cutting-edge theory of emergence, exploring the ways intelligent systems are built from small, unintelligent elements without control from above. Johnson is a journalist for an online magazine; emergence is being touted as the coming paradigm for the Internet. Johnson discerns emergent qualities on the Internet by using analogies from the biological world, so it is with the world of slime molds and ant colonies that Johnson repairs to report on people who have teased out rules of emergence. Entomologist Deborah Gordon tells him about the iterative acts of ants that produce the meta-behavior of colonies in Arizona (a reprise for readers of her Ants at Work, 1999). Cities also exhibit emergence, with Johnson reminding us of what Engels wrote about Manchester and Jane Jacobs about New York in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). From these and other examples, such as the popular computer game SimCity, the Web site eBay, or a cyber-community called slashdot.com, Johnson generalizes five rules of "bottom-up" behavior in self-organizing systems. A lively snapshot of current trends. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"A lucid discussion of a fascinating and timely set of ideas." -- Steven Pinker, author of How the Mind Works
"Emergence is thoughtful and lucid and charming and staggeringly smart...a rare, bona fide glimpse of the future." -- Kurt Andersen, author of Turn of the Century
Esther Dyson author of Release 2.0 Emergence will make understanding "emerge" in your own head, as Steven Johnson explains a lot of phenomena you may not even have noticed: Why are kids so comfortable with complex discovery games? Why are the antiglobalization protests resonating so widely? How can Web sites foster trust when their visitors don't know one another? -- Review
From the Publisher
"Emergent behaviour isn't just a fascinating quirk of science: it's the future ... Johnson opens our eyes to swarm-logic behaviour in our own lives ... with wit, clarity and enthusiasm." --David Pogue, The New York Times "Fascinating and timely." --Steven Pinker
"A dizzying, dazzling romp through fields as disparate as urban planning, computer-game design, neurology and control theory." --Tom Standage, Economist
"A delight ... clever and thought-provoking." --Edward Dolnick, Washington Post
"A fine new book ... As Johnson explains with brainy but convivial clarity, self-organization describes systems, like slime moulds or computer simulations, that generate rich and complicated global behaviour without being controlled through hierarchical 'top-down' commands." --Erik Davis, Village Voice
"We have all learnt that a swarm of bees does not follow a single bee, but moves in concert by following simple rules ... It takes a clear, focused book like Johnson's to remind us what connection these truths have and a powerful imagination to link them to the growth of ghettos, the importance of city pavements and the march of slime mould ... Johnson verbalizes what we are beginning to intuit." --Danny O'Brien, Sunday Times
"Johnson rises as the populist champion of emergence." --Wired
"An exhilarating ride through neuroscience and town planning, evolutionary psychology and video-game design ... Johnson skilfully weaves together the growth of cities, the organization of protest movements, and the limits and strengths of the human brain." --J. G. Ballard, Daily Telegraph
"Mind-expanding ... intelligent, witty and tremendously thought-provoking ... full of surprises." --Chris Lavers, Guardian
About the Author
Steven Johnson is the cofounder of Feed (www.feedmag.com), the Internet's acclaimed voice on technology, science, and culture. Newsweek named him one of their "50 People Who Matter Most on the Internet," and The Village Voice chose him as one of their nine "Writers on the Verge 2000." Johnson's work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Lingua Franca, Harper's, Brill's Content, and the London Guardian. He holds a B.A. in semiotics from Brown University and an M.A. in English from Columbia, and he lives in New York City.
