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.
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
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 3.5 / 5.0
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. It is written with a somewhat emotional style; probably not an ideal technical resource. For the readers not akin to the concepts at all, the book successfully conveys a nice (and vitally important) way of interpreting natural phenomena (that of self-organisation, collective intelligence, etc.), but, through its somewhat emotional style, may create a sort of hype around the concept. A... more info
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. The system can be an ant colony, the Internet, a nation, or any collection of individual agents or actors. To take one example, an ant colony, can be studied in terms of the individual intelligence and actions and behavior of the individual ants in the colony. This is the micro-view. However, collectively, the ants function together in a system (i.e., the colony). Thus, the... more info
Disappointment:
I saw Steven Johnson's lively and a compellingly fascinating presentation on the topic of the book at a conference, which inspired my desire to read his book. Unfortunately, the 250+ pages of the book provide very little insight beyond a 30+ minute presentation. The writing style is not forceful or engaging, but rather dull and lifeless. The lasting feeling is that the author is attempting to make the book accessible to a group of smart 10 year olds by using short sentences, simple vocabulary and... more info
Great start; Unresolved ending; Ultimately disappointing:
I purchased this book on something of a whim; it was listed as recommended by Amazon and looked like something worth checking out. This is appropriate because software systems that make recommendations based on history and feedback are one of the topics that get discussed in this book. The concept appealed to me for a number of reasons. First, it seemed like a fascinating study of complex systems and the relationship therein between the components, the system as a whole, and that which may be greater then... more info
