It's a little dated, but I still found it really interesting. The whole premise of the book is about bottom-up systems rather than top down directives. Ants, Ebay, and neighborhoods are just some examples of bottom-up systems. That part was pretty interesting. I did get a little lost in some of the technical speak. It was kind of fun to see what the author wrote about that had become true for technology since the writing of the book (and also fun to see the things he thought would happen that definitely haven't happened).

قرأت الكتاب باقتراح من الدكتورة هبة رؤوف
الكتاب موضوعه جميل وجديد رغم أن فكرة الكتاب بدأت بعد أحداث ١١ أيلول
المقاربة الاساسية في الكتاب هي تشبيهات وكيفية ربط الكاتب لكثير من الظواهر كمستعمرات أو قوالب الوحل ونشوء المدن وعسكرتها والتطور التكنولوجي وعقول البشر وغيرها الكثير في قالب سهل ممتنع
والشي المهم وهو ما يؤكده الكتاب أن نتواضع كبشر ولننظر بعين من يريد التعلم من كثير من الظواهر الطبيعية المحيطة بنا والتي نعمي اعيننا عندما نراها

An all around amazing read that has aged perfectly well and serves as a fantastic basic introduction to the cross-cutting science of emergence.

In my mind I've split this book into two halves: the half that is severely fascinating, opening doors for me to think about emergence on new scales and inspiring me to contemplate how I could build a model of memory with the principle at its core-- memory as a decentralized, locally interconnected, self-organizing network of instances. I could do that. And I owe the complete absorption of my thoughts with the idea to Johnson and his fascinating first few chapters.
The other half of the book is a reiteration of clever metaphors the author uses so persistently that they cease to be clever, a lacklustre tour of the tech industry in the early 2000's (filled with the embarrassing techno-web-whatever buzzwords that permeated the scene at the time), and a set of altogether too optimistic predictions for the internet, media, and emergence "by 2005".


The four star rating is for that first half of the book, which I will pretend is the entire book.

Johnson explores the phenomenon of emergence on scales as diverse as ant colonies, cities over centuries, the internet, news and media corporations, media consumption trends and communities, video games, and of course, the brain.

The fifth star for the half of this book that I am treating as the imaginary whole was forfeited to bad, sloppy, lazy neuroscience. Infinitely more could have been done in this section, and done better, if the reader is to accept the proposition that the human brain is an example of emergence. Johnson flirts with Hofstadter-esque notions of consciousness, again sloppily, without ever getting up the balls to propose them outright. And then he just finishes and moves on.

The single most interesting application of the idea of emergence: that for all our sense of a unified self controlling our thoughts and actions, we are little more than a colony of neurons connected on very local scales...... to which he devotes maybe 10 pages before talking for an entire chapter about Will Wright and the Sims games.

The cognitivist core of my heart is sad and disappointed. But excited nevertheless. ONWARDS, TO MORE BOOKS ABOUT EMERGENCE!

Emergence is a concept that you once learn about, you will start observing it everywhere. It's a topic that connects everything from ants, evolution to media. Its a great read for anyone interested in the complex system called nature around us.

I added this book to my list years and years ago and I think it has dated quite a bit since. It never really grabbed my attention the whole eay through.

It was interesting to see the author excited about things in the early 2000s that aren't so popular now, in privacy terms.

He presses his finger to his temple, and raises a Spockish eyebrow: 'Hmmmm. Fascinating.'

Really enjoyed the first 100-150 pages of the book. Gives a solid introduction to complexity theory, however the last chapters are extremely disappointing. Classic case imo of a publisher demanding that the book needs to have 200+ pages to be publishable. Cut the last chapters and it's an amazing book!!

The book tells a fascinating story of how systems emerge. Johnson presents a wide range of situations where complicated actions develop with no developer or planner leading the process. There are rules which form the basis of the productions. For example birds flying together with intricate moves do not have a leader. Johnson brings clarity to the emergence, although mysteries abound, with examples in our own brains and in our computers. He has a light and friendly touch as he evolves this tale.

Thought Provoking

Really well-written book about how complex systems develop. It gets a little slow towards the end, but still well worth reading.

Wonderful!

Published in 2001 but still holds up well today in its discussion of the subject of emergence and self organization. It briefly touches on the possibilities of emergent patterns brought to bear on an expended layer of networked items such as appliances and their learned ability to "read minds" which results in some event or action to be taken. An idea more recently discussed the book, "Enchanted Objects." Sensor-driven networked objects will require self organizing system constructive abilities to make sense of multitude of prescient or useless data they receive. We still have yet to see where this transformative technology will lead the us but the Pandora's box is already open. Just look at Fitbit.

Of particular note is the Notes and Bibliography sections of the book which are very well documented and provide the reader with a multitude of background material for further investigation.