| 'Emergence' by Steven Johnson |
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| 'Emergence' by Steven Johnson |
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Steven Johnson has written a classic book about the new science of 'emergence'. Emergence is about how new behaviour 'emerges' from the activities of a collection of individuals. Obviously we have known for a long time that something different can happen when you have enough components interacting with one another - the saying 'the whole is bigger than the parts' has been around for a long time. Until recently, though, the phenomenon has not been studied in any depth. This is partly because the tools - in particular cheap computer processing power - have not been available. It's also partly because we as humans have tried to impose our own hierarchical view of how things are organised onto examples of emergent behaviour. Take for instance an ants nest. All school children know that there is a queen ant who lays the eggs for the nest, and who is fed by the worker ants. But the term 'queen' opens us to all kinds of misunderstandings as to how the ant colony works. Yes, of course, the queen is essential to the survival of the colony, but she is not in any sense 'in charge' or the ruler of the nest. The colony is created and maintained by all the ants applying sets of low level rules to their behaviour. Rules that determine what they do when they meet ants for the same, or other nests, for instance. It is the sum of these small individual actions that provides the overall 'intelligence' of the ants nest, not some sort of overall super-ant that provides direction. Johnson uses as examples not only ants nests, but also slime molds (ick!), cities and the Sim City series of computer games. He also looks at some of the things that are starting to emerge from the Internet and the World Wide Web. He does this in a way which is much more accessible to ordinary readers than most of the other authors in the field. For me one of the achievements of this book, as someone who had already encountered some of the underlying ideas of emergence before was that it caused me to make the leap from nodding sagely and saying, "Yes, this exhibits emergent behaviour" to understanding that things exhibiting emergent behaviour may exist in their own right, with their own type of 'life'. As the author points out in the case of ant colonies, the colonies have a definite, and real, life-cycle, and the different phases of the life-cycle show different activities. Over the fifteen year life of a colony there were found to be definite infant, adolescent and mature phases, and responses to outside events vary according to the phase. This all raises what will be for some disturbing implications. On the one hand are the implications for the existence of intelligence in humans. Is it 'merely' emergent behaviour? On the other hand what about new emergent behaviours? Will humans be superseded by newly emergent behaviours coming out of modern technologies like the Internet or the products of nano-technology? These implications are, unfortunately, beyond the scope of the book. That's sad, because I for one would like to find out what an author of Steven Johnson's calibre has to say about them. This book will do for Emergence theory what James Gleick's 'Chaos' did to make Chaos theory accessible to the general public. An excellent read!
'emergence' by Steven Johnson |
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