Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software in 100+ Books in 2025

Aug 21, 2008 Dolly rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2013, nonfiction, science, other-usa, read-but-not-finished-reviewing, new-england, italy-italian-roman

I put this book on my to-read list almost five years ago and I'm just now getting to it. It really goes to show how fast technology and information changes, as I noticed several dated bits of information throughout. Some of the technology references, such as Simcity and Zelda are almost nostalgic at this point, but his points are still valid, and perhaps even more so today. The narrative is very readable and although the author gets quite technical in parts, I thought it was fairly easy to under I put this book on my to-read list almost five years ago and I'm just now getting to it. It really goes to show how fast technology and information changes, as I noticed several dated bits of information throughout. Some of the technology references, such as Simcity and Zelda are almost nostalgic at this point, but his points are still valid, and perhaps even more so today. The narrative is very readable and although the author gets quite technical in parts, I thought it was fairly easy to understand his points.

I enjoyed the scientific explanation for self-organizing and emergent systems and I can see how these are very common today, even here on Goodreads. I love his discussion about bottom-up inputs creating order and design. Overall, I thought of this book as more of a historical perspective, and I realize how quickly books about technology get out of date. I will certainly look for more recent books on this topic at our local library.

interesting quotes:

[regarding self-organizing systems] "What features do all these systems have? In the simplest terms, they solve problems by drawing on masses of relatively stupid elements, rather than a single, intelligent 'executive branch.' They are bottom-up systems, not top-down. They get their smarts from below. In a more technical language, they are complex adaptive systems that display emergent behavior. In these systems, agents residing on one scale start producing behavior that lies one scale above them: ants create colonies; urbanites create neighborhoods; simple pattern-recognition software learns how to recommend new books. The movement from low-level rules to higher-level sophistication is what we call emergence." (p. 18)

"Our minds may be wired to look for pacemakers, but we are steadily learning how to think from the bottom up." (p. 67)

"Ants and termites make up 30 percent of the Amazonian rain forest biomass. With nearly ten thousand known species, ants rival modern humans in their global reach: the only large landmasses free of ant natives are Antarctica, Iceland, Greenland, and Polynesia." (p.73)

"Local turns out to be the key term in understanding the power of swarm logic. We see emergent behavior in systems like ant colonies when the individual agents in the system pay attention to their immediate neighbors rather than wait for orders from above. They think locally and act locally, but their collective action produces global behavior." (p. 74)

"If you're building a system designed to learn from the ground level, a system where macrointelligence and adaptability derive from local knowledge, there are five fundamental principles you need to follow. Gordon's harvester ants showcase all of them at work:
More is different
Ignorance is useful
Encourage random encounters
Look for patterns in the signs
Pay attention to your neighbors" (pp. 77-79)

[attributed to Matt Ridley] "The great beauty of embryo development, the bit that human beings find so hard to grasp, is that it is a totally decentralized process. Since every cell in the body carries a complete copy of the genome, no cell need wait for instructions from authority; every cell can act on its own information and the signals it receives from its neighbors." (p. 86)

"Metropolitan space may habitually be pictured in the form of skylines, but the real magic of city living comes from below." (p. 92)

"Perceived at that scale, the success of the urban superorganism might well be the single most momentous global event of the past few centuries: until the modern era less than 3 percent of the world's population lived in communities of more than five thousand people; today, half the planet lives in urban environments." (p. 99)

"This is the oft-noted paradox of the Web: the more information that flows into its reservoirs, the harder it becomes to find any single piece of information in that sea." (p. 117)

[attributed to Ray Kurzweil] "Humans are far more skilled at recognizing patterns than in thinking through logical combinations, so we rely on this aptitude for almost all of our mental processes. Indeed, pattern recognition comprises the bulk of our neural circuitry. These faculties make up for the extremely slow speed of human neurons." (p. 127)

"Without that negative feedback pulling our circadian rhythms back into sync, we'd find ourselves sleeping through the day for two weeks of every month." (p. 140)

[regarding people from Generation Y and after] "I think they've developed another skill, one that almost look like patience: they are more tolerant of being out of control, more tolerant of that exploratory phase where the rules don't all make sense, and where few goals have been clearly defined. In other words, they are uniquely equipped to embrace the more oblique control system of emergent software." (pp. 176-177)

"Autism, the argument goes, stems from an inability to project outside one's own head and imagine the mental life of others. And yet autistics regularly fare well on many tests of general intelligence and often display exceptional talents at math and pattern recognition. Their disorder is not a disorder of lowered intellect. Rather, autistics lack a particular skill, the way others lack the faculty of sight or hearing. They are mind blind." (p. 199)

"CEOs still have a place in even the most distributed corporate structure, but they're no longer allowed to be pacemakers." (pp. 223-224)

new words: senescence, bromides, paeans, noosphere, tropes
...more

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