With some interruption this month, I finished reading Steven Johnson‘s book “Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software“. I watched a Long Now Foundation Seminar About Long-term Thinking given by the author that I found interesting, and decided to read this book of his I’d previously heard of relating to Complexity Theory.
Steven Johnson is a popular-science author, who’s written for various scientific magazines. He’s also been involved with several nascent website services like online magazines and geo-aware search & communities. He writes on various loosely related subjects about modern scientific developments, both in subject and in community.
“Emergence” is about just that, emergent systems, or Complex Adaptive System( CAS ) that exhibit synergistic properties. The author uses various examples in the book, including:
- self-organizing “slime mold“
- ant-colony behaviour
- emergent cities, and neighbourhoods within cities
- cognitive abilities from neurons
- artificial intelligence techniques
The author also covers the underlying processes of these emergent systems. These include:
- complex systems – deterministic systems whose outcomes are sensitive to initial conditions
- feedback loops, both positive and negative.
- competition – something to drive system selection
There was allot of interesting details conveyed in the book, including work done by various people in the field of CAS, as well as implications for internet phenomena of the future.
Overall though, I wasn’t really impressed. I wasn’t left with a strong message at the end of the book, and I had been exposed to most of this type of analysis / field of study before. I was interrupted for a week in the middle of the book, so perhaps that plays part of my unimpressiveness about this book. 2 out of 4 possible stars.