Good book but I feel it was needlessly long & rather repetitive in parts. Interesting though!

I normally love watching Steven Johnson thread his way through a set of topics and knit them together to show how they're all connected, but for me this book just ended up feeling like a bunch of knots.

The book starts out well with a look at any colonies running smoothly without any master control and he sort of uses that as an example for how our brains and cities work, but the argument seemed slim. About midway through the book he starts wandering off on several other tangents that don't feel any way connected to the main topic or that have a "grasping at straws" feel to them. I'm not sure if the book would have worked any better had he focused more on the topics in the subtitle, but it simply didn't make for enjoyable or interesting reading.

I highly recommend most Steven Johnson books, but I'd give this one a pass if you're just trying his writing out for the first or second time.

This book changed the course of my life forever. For the better.

Johnson selects really interesting topics for his books. Both this and his book on neuroscience, "Mind Wide Open", are about fundamentally important and fascinating subjects with far-reaching implications. However, in both cases, the finished product remains somewhat dissatisfying.

This volume starts with a lot of promise, as Johnson describes the results of emergence in various contexts, like ant colonies, slime mold aggregation, the organic growth of cities, SimCity, and neuroscience. I got excited because I expected this was a prelude to a formal description of emergence or at least a sketch of how emergence generally operates. I remained largely disappointed. Johnson tosses off a few high-level signifiers of emergence (simple behaviors enhanced by local feedback, positive feedback loops, complexity, random encounters, pattern detection, etc.), but he does little work to tease out a detailed anatomy of emergence. His examples are all interesting but the explanation often consists of "that's a complex system without a pacemaker but order emerges; how about that!". He's providing descriptions, not explanations, and not very detailed ones at that.

The book grows progressively worse as it goes along, with the feedback loop of Johnson's breezy anecdotalism magnified into an increasingly frustrating pile-on of examples gleaned from whichever scientist would talk to him about their projects, or whichever books he's read recently. We get little snippets on mirror neurons, on the development of theory of mind in children (apparently happens between 3 and 4 years of age), and on the spat between Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford on the theories set forth in her "The Death and Life of Great American Cities". Most of this stuff is interesting but not insightful. I began to despair as it became apparent that no deep theory of emergence would emerge from Johnson's account.

I do have to give credit to this book for arousing my curiosity. It was fun to think about emergence and how disparate systems produce order from chaos. Trying to catalog the similarities behind emergent systems is a useful exercise while reading through the case studies here, even if Johnson won't do the heavy lifting for you. It's also funny to read this 20 years later, as many of Johnson's prognostications on the future of the internet are laughable, but many are actually quite spot-on in terms of algorithmic learning, the fragmentation of news and advertising feeds, and the curating of individual online experiences through feedback loops generated by massive datasets of aggregate choices. Johnson saw something coming, even if he couldn't know the details.

Read with a 15+ year retrospective, Johnson's 2001 predictions are sometimes amusing and more often strangely prescient. He's more or less right on everything from the future of TV ("The entertainment world will self-organize into clusters of shared interest, created by software that tracks usage patterns...") and news ("The Daily Me ... compiled by tracking the interests and reading habits of millions of other humans."), to the polarization of public opinion and the sensationalization of media (which raised in my mind the question of whether applying Slashdot-style moderation on a wider scale could take care of fringe elements on the Web, or just make them more obnoxious). The book is also a nostalgic trip back in time to when I first dove onto the world of technology. Remember TiVo, Napster, and Bill Clinton's sex scandals? They're all here!

Do I recommend reading it? Not unless you're particularly interested in the field of emergence or machine learning and you want that look back at where we came from. It would have been a good book back in 2001, if a bit too ponderous and contrived at times (hard to take seriously passages about "revolutionary" websites or video games that no one remembers 15 years on).

An invaluable book for a short story I am trying to craft. For those who make it through to the discussions on emergent video games, check out Jonathan Blow and his recent work as well. Jonathan led me here in a somewhat roundabout way. And my outlook on the creation of art through emergent means instead of strict top-down contrivance has changed a lot! Cheers.

This book is truly fascinating. Well, at least the first half is. It presents emergence, the idea that individuals or simple systems can create complex networks from the bottom up (e.g. ant colonies, cities, the internet). The first half really gets you thinking and provides detailed examples of emergence. The second half, however, spirals into dated examples and predictions related to technology and AI. I still think it’s worth checking out.

One of these books that will get you introduced to an idea and hooked on a particular subject and which you can forget thereafter. As of early (2017) the perception of the emergence phenomenon re-emerged, probably due to a buzz around AI and big data (after all aren’t we all now playing role of agents in a self-amplifying system?). Hence, going over a bit chatty, repetitive and at places patchy and rather shallow coverage of ants colonies, genetic programming, evolution, urban planning, language and even consciousness in context of the emergence (as of 2001) isn’t probably going to be the best utilisation of your time. It’s the second book by Steven Johnson that leaves me with such a feeling (other being Everything Bad Is Good for You). I guess, that’s the nature of journalist work vs. a scientist sitting down to write a book on a subject em is expert at. Even doing a quick search one would discover that strangely the books doesn’t cover works of Hartmann nor Corning (seems crucial whilst covering emergency phenomenon). Strangely, as it seems that Steven was down to speak to AI specialist, there is no mention of boids - Craig Reynolds’ simulation of flocking behaviour of birds, etc. All in all, I guess, that I need to read the “Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos” by Waldrop or something else from splendid bibliography that Steven put together (hence 3 vs 2 stars given) and then move into something a bit more concrete / modern on the subject (from brain internals to genetic programming).

Open your eyes to the emergence of the nature, how systems are driven by bottom-up processes, how the nature of life at different scales are beign order at certain degree.

Many of our conducts and behavior are regulated by these patterns.

Considering this book was written 20 years ago, gave many insights into the future , that now became a reality.

I enjoyed this book and then I didn’t. Emergence starts out as a field guide to the idea of emergence and how it crosses all kinds of disciplines. This is the best part. But the bulk of the book, written in Wired Magazine-style gee-whiz-techster prose, is devoted to computer programming and the author going on and on about what he thinks is and isn’t emergence. Tedious.

Also, if any book could benefit from a thorough soaking in Austrian economics, this is it. Hayekian notions of dispersed information, decentralized order, and relatively simple decisions by individuals (about prices of goods for example) giving rise to macro structures (like the flow of goods in and out of a city, regulated by no one) are emergent mechanisms! Johnson has little interest in econ, tho, beyond a few silly digs at libertarians and the favorable quoting of Naomi Klein. Sigh. Anything to keep one’s progressive bona fides intact, I guess. It’s too bad, because Johnson, something of a technocrat, keeps trying to shoehorn emergent orders into the central planner’s toolbox. I think he missed the point.

Hopelessly out of date, of course, but still a well-written and interesting snapshot of emergence theory in 2001. It actually still applies in many ways and was forward-looking. And it reminded me of a few things I had forgotten about the 1990s and a few things I hadn't known. For instance, he focuses in one story on Alexa Internet, an early system for recording activity online and predicting preferences -- acquired by Amazon in 1999, the same year they started allowing customers to rate the reviews of other customers... All in all pretty enjoyable.

This book does a good job explaining phenomena of emergence. Lots of examples, good details on how science of self-organization appeared. There are some points of speculation that I did not like, and I was very hungry for more theoretical thinking from the author. But in general this is a good popular science book on complexity.