Emergence by Steven Johnson
Posted on May 10th, 2005
I wish I had read this book before James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds. They cover similar subjects, but whereas Crowds focuses on more human-driven examples to make his points-- politics and economics for example-- Emergence finds similar patterns in the natural and artificial worlds.
Emergence is what happens when small things combine to form something larger than the sum of their parts. It's an ant colony that can run itself without a central force dictating the movements and purpose of each member. It's a city comprised of many constituent neighborhoods that is able to concentrate information and ideas with a type of "connectedness" that precedes anything digital.
And once you've got the power to create emergence, what can you do with it? Johnson writes:
...in the third phase-- the one that began sometime in the past decade, the one that lies at the very heart of this book-- we stopped analyzing emergence and started creating it. We began building self-organizing systems into our software applications, our video games, our art, our music. We built emergent systems to recommend new books, recognize our voices, or find mates. For as long as complex organisms have been alive, they have lived under the laws of self-organization, but in recent years our day-to-day life has become overrun with artificial emergence: systems built with a conscious understanding of what emergence is, systems designed to exploit those laws the same way our nuclear reactors exploit the laws of atomic physics. Up to now, the philosophers of emergence have struggled to interpret the world. But they are not starting to change it.
The last book I read, The Age of Spiritual Machines, discussed what the near and distant future would bring with regard to technology. The ideas of emergence feel like a way from getting from here to there. We've got bits and pieces here and there-- Slashdot's karma system in particular, which Johnson discusses in his book-- but nothing big enough to umbrella all our online activity from startup to shutdown.
We do have the idea that sharing is good, though. Or at least a strong desire to be seen and heard. I think the popularity of blogging and syndication feeds is going to be met with an equally strong interest in filtering and ferreting out good content from noise. And eventually we'll be able to communicate our preferences to Internet-based agents, and leave the dirty work of search and retrieval to them. By the time that happens, we'll have something entirely new on our hands that might reside within the Internet, but still be able to reach beyond it.