I disliked this book because I considered it a weak argument for a concept that was never satisfyingly defined. In addition, the author lacks domain expertise in a number of areas that lead to some rather hilarious misunderstandings. In particular, the author does not understand the concept of determinism with respect to a random seed. Given that this is rather critical in all of the software concepts mentioned, it undermines his thesis dramatically.

Honorably, the author makes several quantified predictions about the near-term future, all of which are incorrect. Next time, Mr. Johnson.

Esperaba mucho de este libro, tal vez por todas las veces que me lo habían recomendado, y por esto lo empecé a leer con grandes expectativas, que al principio fueron cumplidas pero poco a poco el libro me fue decepcionando.

Tiene un tema interesante: cómo muchos comportamientos complejos se forman a partir de reglas simples entre sus componentes. Habla de las colonias de hormigas, de las ciudades, del cerebro, internet y de algunos programas que pueden ayudar a modelar, simular y entender esto mejor.

Siento que el libro envejeció un poco mal, además de que es muy verboso y repetitivo, por eso le puse esa calificación. Sin embargo, me llevo algunas ideas que me sorprendieron y se me hacen valiosas:

- Un sistema emergente "aprende" sin que ese conocimiento dependa de alguno de sus individuos, o por lo menos eso parecen demostrar las "personalidades" de las colonias de hormigas a través de los diferentes ciclos de vida.
- Un sistema emergente necesita un volumen mínimo para funcionar
- Los componentes del sistema no necesitan ser inteligentes, solamente seguir algunas reglas relativamente simples
- Podemos usar estos comportamientos para crear mecanismos que encuentren soluciones óptimas

Me quedo con la duda: ¿Puede nuestro cerebro considerarse un sistema emergente?

Es una lectura interesante, pero me hubiera gustado más corta, concisa y menos verbosa.

Great book for the time it was written some really interesting predictions that have come true, but it does suffer from its age and tackling the issues of emergence that were problems in the early aughts.

This was a fun blast from the past. Written in 2001, Johnson was writing his second book about the bubbling, boiling tech scene. He makes a few good predictions, which I prodded him about on Twitter- namely that he predicted Twitter would be a shithole.

I think that Johnson kind of confuses a few concepts here. Ants and cities certainly have emergent behavior. So does software that is designed around the same principle, namely: distributed agents following simple rules create large scale patterns that tend to equilibrium. That's good, and it reasonably predicts that changing the simple rules will change the large scale patterns and that the Internet would (has) changed a lot of those simple rules.

He also seems to mix up a lot of concepts that we would categorize today as 'machine learning' and that really have nothing to do with agents making their own decision. I guess ensemble machine learning is technically "many agents"?... but not really.

Good entertainment book if you like Johnson (and you should like him), and maybe a good book if you're doing historical research into pre-Web 2.o Web.20 concepts... otherwise it is a bit dated.

An intriquingly poetic non-fiction pointing out the repeating ”emergent” patterns across multiple structures from cities to software and ant colonies, and explaining why the whole can be smarter than the sum of its parts. This book is still relevant (though the tech talk was definitely outdated) with software eating the world and self-organising companies being the hype. I would have liked a deeper dive into the emergence theory though.

The concept of complex systems (like cities, ant colonies or our nervous system) emerging from simple rules/actions is fascinating and the author clearly emphasizes it. However, a large part of the book repeats the same ant-colony argument and tries to connect it to the web technology in the early 2000s...

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (Paperback)
by Steven Johnson
from the library

from the library computer:
Table of Contents
Introduction: Here Comes Everybody!
PART ONE
The Myth of the Ant Queen
PART TWO
Street Level
The Pattern Match
Listening to Feedback
Control Artist
PART THREE
The Mind Readers
See What Happens
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index


Booklist Reviews

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. ((Reviewed July 2001))Copyright 2001 Booklist Reviews

Kirkus Reviews

A lucid presentation of emergence theory-the way decentralized thinking allows for cannily effective self-organization-from Feed editor-in-chief Johnson (Interface Culture, not reviewed)."The movement from low-level rules to higher-level sophistication is what we call emergence," writes Johnson, explaining that local, parallel, cumulatively complex interactions result in some kind of discernable macrobehavior. And that behavior, if adaptive, has the distinctive quality of growing smarter over time. One needn't be conscious or aware of the process, either, argues Johnson: if learning is considered the absorption and retrieval of information, then, for instance, the topography of a city qualifies as emergent behavior. An ant colony is another good example, where the ants as agents produce behavior that allows for a step in the direction of higher organization-from ants to colonies. Johnson's clarity is a boon when it comes to explaining such ideas as swarm logic and the way phenomena like critical mass, ignorance, random encounters, pattern recognition, and local attentiveness result in a collective phenomena of remarkable elegance organized from below, without the dubious benefits of hierarchy. Emergence is nothing new, Johnson notes-surely the way in which the guilds organized themselves in 12th-century Florence is an example, let alone how the cells in our bodies act the way they do, for better or worse-but we are now simply recognizing it as a quiet, generative force working in theaters ranging from the slime mold (dissolving and regrouping upon signals from the molecular level) to the negative-positive feedback loops that self-govern sites on the Internet. Examples abound, and Johnson reaps them everywhere, from software design to CNN, where the common pool of news has allowed local networks to choose their own programming, subverting the mother network's dominance.Thought-provoking-and deeply appealing to the inner iconoclast.Copyright Kirkus 2001 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved

Publishers Weekly Reviews

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.

The Wisdom of Crowds

Dated (written in 2020) Don’t think he proves his premise about bottoms up driving history. Also, sort of scattered writing. Doesn’t stay on topic well.

While not a page turner and some of it's predictions seem dated (although not too inaccurate), the content is valuable. Focussing and recognising the value of distributed behaviours is a bit of an eye opener.

Very well written, accessible account on the topic of wisdom of crowds and how order can emerge seemingly out of chaos even in the absence of a “pacemaker” or similar. The examples picked were wide-ranging, so anyone who reads this one is likely to find one that resonates with them, and Johnson writes incredibly well for a topic that’s quite difficult to explain. I’m not entirely sure why I wasn’t inclined to give this one 5 stars, as overall I did enjoy it, but somehow it didn’t give that “I loved it!” vibe at the end. Like many books of these sorts I found some chapters better written / researched than others, but overall it was a good read and also referred to other interesting-sounding works that I will be checking out. Solid 4 stars.

I got through 143 pages of this clunky book before I finally decided life was too short to spend plodding through books I wasn’t enjoying. It felt tedious and disjointed, more philosophical than informative. Reading it in 2024 did make the 2001 descriptions of machine learning feel quaint and cute though.

I read a similar books and this one is little dry
Some portion are interesting especially the self organisation of city