Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software

by Steven Johnson

3.94 of 5 stars 3.94 · rating details · 1,352 ratings · 140 reviews

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

A VOICE LITERARY SUPPLEMENT TOP 25 FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR

AN ESQUIRE MAGAZINE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

In the tradition of Being Digital and The Tipping Point, Steven Johnson, acclaimed as a "cultural critic with a poet's heart" (The Village Voice), takes readers on an eye-opening journey through emergence theory and its applications. Explai

...more

Paperback, 288 pages

Published August 27th 2002 by Scribner (first published August 28th 2001)

more details... edit details

Get a copy:

More…

Friend Reviews

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

Lists with This Book

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks

Radiolab Suggested Readings

24th out of 150 books — 126 voters

Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter

A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram

Complexity

2nd out of 23 books — 16 voters

More lists with this book...

Community Reviews

(showing 1-30 of 3,000)

filter | sort: default (?) | rating details

Apr 26, 2013 Carol marked it as to-read

Shelves: my-library, non-fiction, mindbender

Every now and then I start reading and realize "this book is going to change how I think."

Its a little bit scary and a lot of bit exciting.

While I know--I know--I picked this up because I thought it was about disease, Emergence has proved far more interesting and satisfying than I could hope. Emergence's premise is about networks and 'organized' behavior that develops from a lower-level to a more sophisticated one. In one sense, this is a very real snapshot of the history of thinking/science cap...more

10 likes · like · see review

Aug 07, 2009 Orton Family Foundation rated it 5 of 5 stars

Some would call me indecisive, fickle, foolish, or a good candidate for Ritalin, given my tendency to engage in many disciplines at once. Even now, with a masters degree in environmental science, I am plotting an eventual return to school for an MFA, or MBA, or MEd, or perhaps just some PhDs. I prefer to think of myself as a generalist, however, in the great tradition of cockroaches, crabgrass, Leonardo DaVinci and Jesse "The Body" Ventura. Indeed, I love finding connections between elements as...more Some would call me indecisive, fickle, foolish, or a good candidate for Ritalin, given my tendency to engage in many disciplines at once. Even now, with a masters degree in environmental science, I am plotting an eventual return to school for an MFA, or MBA, or MEd, or perhaps just some PhDs. I prefer to think of myself as a generalist, however, in the great tradition of cockroaches, crabgrass, Leonardo DaVinci and Jesse "The Body" Ventura. Indeed, I love finding connections between elements as seemingly unrelated as spineless arthropods and politicians (though perhaps that’s not the best example), and in turn to connect those connections with important issues and strategies for change.

Given my penchant for unusual logic, it was a no-brainer to revisit Steven Johnson’s Emergence: the connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software, published by Scribner Press in 2001. These organisms and objects do indeed have connected lives and relate as well to planning, community development, and citizen participation. The main connection, as the title suggests, is the concept of emergence, which Johnson defines as "what happens when you have a system of relatively simple-minded component parts—often there are thousands or millions of them—and they interact in relatively simple ways. And yet somehow out of all this interaction some higher level structure or intelligence appears, usually without any master planner calling the shots."

Ants create colonies that thrive by taking on specialized tasks, though there is no top-down control or even pre-programmed genetic instruction on how to do so. The Internet has grown to include millions of independent sites and connections without any grand plan for development and management. Slime mold cells aimlessly slither across the forest floor until they all suddenly, inexplicably join together and form one superorganism. The millions, perhaps billions of species on earth continue to evolve and specialize—one generation, one organism, one cell, or even one protein at a time. The phenomenon of emergence is as old as the universe itself and as young as each new website, instance of mitosis, or human decision. As much as humans like to hold themselves above the laws of physics and nature, urban development and other sophisticated endeavors are a matter of emergence as well. “While actual cities are heavily shaped by top-down forces, such as zoning laws and planning commissions,” Johnson writes, “scholars have long recognized that bottom-up forces play a critical role in city formation, creating distinct neighborhoods and other unplanned demographic clusters… Like any emergent system, a city is a pattern in time.”

In a sense, this theory bodes poorly for the planning field; we’ve worried for years that human skills and interactions may become obsolete with a rise in digital technology and robotics, but perhaps we will instead be replaced by a simple and ancient concept. If cities will self-construct, evolve, learn, and replicate without any help from master plans, government officials, zoning regulations and licensed planners (the horror!), then what good are visioning documents, charrettes, ballot initiatives, and public meetings? Resistance is futile, according to the wisdom of emergence and Star Trek, but could our tinkering go so far as to harm the development of communities we care so much about?

It is indeed unlikely that we can excuse ourselves from a phenomenon shaping the universe and everything in it. We can use emergence to our advantage, however, if we act a little less like planners and more like 19th Century Augustinian monks. Gregor Mendel spent hours examining pea plants in his garden and eventually came to realize that we are all products of natural selection. Rather than attempting to subvert the process, Mendel (and generations to follow) instead adopted it and adjusted it to further their own purposes. Artificial selection first gave us sheep with extra wool, then hardy varieties of corn and wheat, and now fruit programmed to ripen and blush in coordination with shipping schedules.

Johnson does not go into great depth on applications of emergence or the scientific and technical details behind it, but with a little creativity and commitment to systems thinking, we could begin to develop “artifical emergence” for the planning and citizen participation fields as web and software developers have done. Johnson says at the close of the book, “understanding emergence has always been about giving up control, letting the system govern itself as much as possible, letting it learn from the footprints.” If we can draw connections between the eBay community and our home towns, for example, we might develop a “community feedback” system to mirror the online “user feedback” system, which nearly-effortlessly improves the quality and consistency of eBay. If we can learn to see the similarities between ants and humans, we might find a way for cities to run and operate without the bureaucracy and top-down controls that dominate planning and management today. If we can stomach the idea that we are linked to slime mold, we might all learn to come together as well as the primitive cells that emerge as one from underneath our feet.

Read more reviews by the Orton Family Foundation in our Scenarios e-journal at http://www.orton.org/resources/public...

-Rebecca Sanborn Stone(less)

2 likes · like · see review

Jan 31, 2012 Chrissy rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: science, non-fiction, cognitive-science, systems-theory

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...more 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!(less)

2 likes · like · see review

Jan 07, 2013 Jeff Brown rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: library, 2013

I've read a couple of other books by this author & found them quite good ("The Ghost Map" and "The Invention of Air" - both of which I recommend highly). But this book was disappointing. He chose to focus almost exclusively on two things to discuss emergent behavior - cities and the internet. He particularly focused on the internet where the discussion was more along the lines of futuristic cheerleading than interesting discussion (and the 10 years since the book was published have not been...more

like · see review

Apr 15, 2009 Michael rated it 4 of 5 stars

As of late, “Emergence” seems to be the hottest buzz word tossed around the crit spaces and seminar rooms of my chosen discipline. Thus it was important that I finally read something about just what the hell the term means. As usual, the unflagging Johnson never fails to enthrall. Who can deny the power of such observations as, “in the case of the Middle Ages, we can safely say that the early village residents shat themselves into full-fledged towns.”? He occasionally descends into the hackneyed...more

like · see review

Sep 24, 2011 rmn rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction-other

A well written book that basically attempts to explain how the development of cities and neighborhoods is more than just entropy, rather it’s the result of local knowledge shared at the individual level. The author, Stephen Johnson, shows how information developed through individual interactions (whether ants, people, or computer programs), instead of from a top down autocrat, more often than not leads to best answers and efficiencies. The reason certain areas thrive or fail isn't just random, i...more

like · see review

Jan 09, 2008 Henry rated it 3 of 5 stars

More stuff emerges from the cloud of gas
Sometimes the cloud turns into an insect
Sometimes the insects turn into brains
Sometimes the brains go to French raves

2 likes · like · see review

Jan 14, 2012 Thomas rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: understanding-things

It's been quite a while since I read this, and I should probably queue it up for a re-read. But at the time I read it, it opened my mind to a lot of ideas that I was ready for, but hadn't quite known how to put together. It might even seem quaint and dated now, but this book, along with a few others like GEB, really put me on the track of investigations and readings I've been pursuing ever since. It was one of those books that I read and then closely scanned the bibliography to find out what els...more

like · see review

Aug 07, 2012 Lawrence Linnen rated it 5 of 5 stars

Might be intimidating to any who think they are leaders. From abstract: Emergence is what happens when an interconnected sytem of relatively simple elements self-organizes to form more intelligent, more adaptive higher-level behavior. It's a bottom-up model; rather than being engineered by a general or a master planner, emergence begins at the ground level. Systems that at first glance seem vastly different--ant colonies, human brains, cities, immune systems--all turn out to follow the rules of...more

like · see review

Dec 25, 2012 Corey rated it 4 of 5 stars

A very interesting survey of the phenomenon of bottom-up, disorganized organization that we see in multiple areas of life, anywhere from the molecular level to society as a system to computer gaming. Johnson, who doesn't seem to have academic credentials in all the areas about which he writes, provides a survey of the ways in which life self-organizes based on feedback, rather than having an authority structure as had been previously assumed. For example, he details research done with ants and h...more

like · see review

Jun 03, 2010 Keya marked it as chaos-emergence-complexity · review of another edition

Shelves: self-organizing-systems, swarm-intelligence, systems-engineering

meh... a lil too much concrete info for my liking

climax stage == carrying capacity

p154
+/- feedback
structured randomness
neighbor interactions
decentralized ctrl

revolution of applied emergence
evolution of social media

pattern matching
- feedback
ordered randomness
distributed intelligence

204-205 climax of the book - explains why he picked & chose the systems he selected for subtitle

233
one kind of decentralized intelligence (the human brain) grasps a new way to apply the lessons of another decentral...more

like · see review

Mar 03, 2011 Elizabeth rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: john-buck

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...more

like · see review

Oct 17, 2009 Alex Johnson rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

So I have finally finished this book. It took a long time to read, not because it is not engaging, but because I have been busy.

The best way to describe it is via his first example. He describes how ants follow a simple set of rules. The are as thick as pig shit, yet ant colonies manage to function in an incredibly sophisticated and highly organised fashion. This is because the individual ants have evolved to follow a simple set of rules which, when thousands of them are all following them, amou...more

like · see review

Feb 18, 2009 Grey rated it 2 of 5 stars

Although a few years old, the recent resurgence of "self-organizing groups" or systems rekindled my interest. However, this book was far from fully satisfying. It repeats several interesting analogies until they are no longer interesting, although some of his predictions about where the Web is going were prescient: e.g., he sort of foretold the "emergence" of Wikipedia.

The most useful insight I got out of this was about why we (humans) are so stuck on pattern recognition (the processing speed an...more

like · see review

Nov 07, 2008 Aaron rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: social-science, finished-despite-myself

I enjoyed this book and then I didn’t. Emergence starts out as a field guide to the idea of emergence and how it crosses all kinds of disciplines. This is the best part. But the bulk of the book, written in Wired Magazine-style gee-whiz-techster prose, is devoted to computer programming and the author going on and on about what he thinks is and isn’t emergence. Tedious.

Also, if any book could benefit from a thorough soaking in Austrian economics, this is it. Hayekian notions of dispersed inform...more

2 likes · like · see review

May 14, 2013 Dolly rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: fans of nonfiction

Shelves: 2013, nonfiction, science, other-usa, italy, new-england

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...more 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
(less)

like · see review

Feb 09, 2009 Giedra rated it 3 of 5 stars

Very interesting "social science" book about the theory of emergence and how the intelligence of social insects is similar to how certain features of cities arise, and how increasing understanding of these phenomena may influence software development and the way we live.

It's already almost 10 years old, so it was interesting to see how some of the author's predictions about video games or the internet have or have not come to pass......and to speculate on the reasons for this.

As I read this, I...more

like · see review

Jun 30, 2008 P.S. rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Nesting, like the point preexisting, but "coming about" where the stairs meet their users at Hogwort's. The opening of Akira/noosphere/A fudgey, vague notion of a sea of White Knowledge (appropriated usage of the term by Gaiman in "Neverwhere", as I've never read a Pratchett novel), comprise of increasingly complex (generally speaking, or such in the attribute of 'general'), and more recent residue of human thoughts, maxims, formulations, equations, data, information, knowledge, etc., that has f...more

like · see review

Oct 26, 2007 Yannis rated it 3 of 5 stars

The first few chapters are a really good overview of the concept of emergent intelligence -- wherein a group individually "dumb" organisms/programs/processes/behaviors gradually cohere into a more intelligent/adaptive whole -- and provide some characteristic examples such as slime molds and ant colonies. The rest of the book becomes increasingly meandering and fluffy, and mostly consists of examples of the phenomenon, drawn from biology, cognitive science, computer programming and networks, and...more

like · see review

Mar 30, 2010 Charlie added it

Shelves: didn-t-finish

I didn't actually finish this book. I got about halfway through before deciding to give up. The book opens really well. I really enjoyed the chapters about ants, slime mould and the history of computer modelling of life. I started to have issues with the chapter about cities. He seems to completely overlook the fact that cities are and always have been subject to huge amounts of central planning. Where I had real issues with this book were with the chapters about the internet and news. This book...more

like · see review

May 19, 2009 Nancy rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2009

Very interesting exploration of bottom-up processes, how a complex system can emerge from very simple, rule-driven parts. I'd be interested to see the latest edition of the book and how the author updated it - I kept getting distracted by the examples of technology that have already changed so much since 2001. I'm not sure an author should ever make specific predictions - e.g., in 2005 thus and such will have happened, since if the prediction is wrong, it is glaringly wrong.

like · see review

Oct 30, 2012 Matthew rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction, recommended

My only nitpick: Chapter 6 gets a little into the territory of "let me make some predictions of how this framework will be implemented future," which is maybe a little overenthusiastic and is already getting a little stale for a book published ten years ago. See also: the various mentions of Napster making record companies nervous and the eager anticipation for The Sims Online.

Those spots aside, the book is very wonderful, and for me was a great introduction to a really fascinating topic I plan...more

like · see review

Oct 22, 2009 James rated it 2 of 5 stars

Johnson's book would have rated higher with me had I read it in 2001 instead of 2008 - it just hasn't aged well; my 2-star ranking splits the difference between the 3 (or even 4) I would likely have given it when brand new and the 1 it (might) deserve today.

The first two chapters were interesting for the connections drawn between different kinds of self-organizing systems, but after that he just kept repeating himself. Or, even more precisely: after that, the things he had to say that were still...more

like · see review

Sep 30, 2012 Mangoo rated it 3 of 5 stars

Unlike the homonimous title from John Holland - definitely more theoretical and formal - this book tries to see what emergence has to give to everyday life and what consequences its developments could have. Once timely, today it shows the need for updates, as the pace of progress in 10 years or so has been tremendous and many ideas are now simply common knowledge. Still, some good reflections found here are still valid.

like · see review

Aug 13, 2012 Doug rated it 2 of 5 stars

Not Johnson's best work. First half of the book was cool, describing existing emergent systems in nature (ant colonies, slime molds) and how they work...and their application to data sorting, urban neighborhoods and the evolution of the urban citiscape. Last 80 pages or so was a struggle for me, however...a lot of conjecture and projection into the future, with some interesting examples...but the argument lost its force of example, logic, and reason in this part of the book and it became monumen...more

like · see review

Feb 16, 2012 Andrew Frueh rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: science

The content of Emergence is interesting, fascinating even. The trouble is mostly with how it is organized. The book has an almost stream-of-consciousness quality to it. Or perhaps it would be more apt to say that the book is organized somewhat like one of the emergent systems Johnson is describing. It's a variety of topics and concepts all loosely tied together around a similar idea. Organizational flaws aside, there is some very intriguing and thought-provoking material here. From the idea of o...more

like · see review

Jun 13, 2008 Kelly rated it 4 of 5 stars

My experience was similar to other reviews here. I loved teh first few chapters and I was hoping for big things and great insights at the end, but it is more of a discussion of current technologies \ products in the headlines at the time of writing.

The first chapter I thought was incredible well written and I learned a lot of very interesting things. I was really impressed with his writing as we very seamlessly move between ant research, urban planning, and right into alan turing and his studies...more

like · see review

Oct 12, 2012 Mr. Shoemaker added it

I enjoyed the first half of the book; an exploration of emergent systems, how parts can create a whole that is greater than the sum of their parts. For example, non-intelligent neurons can link together to form intelligence in the brain. This is fun in a Philosophy 101 sort of way. It remind me of when I read Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, Bach" for the first time.

The second half of this 2001 book speculates on what emergence might mean in terms of the internet and society in general. This part al...more

like · see review

Aug 27, 2012 Matt rated it 5 of 5 stars

As far as theory-of-everything-type books go, this one is good. Finished this book about a week ago and I have yet to go a day without thinking about one of its concepts.

And despite being written in 2001, the author's take on the internet is by no means outdated. In fact, nearly all his predictions concerning the web seem to more or less be happening.

like · see review

Aug 27, 2011 Words Deeds rated it 5 of 5 stars

Less freewheeling than Kevin Kelly's "Out of Control," just as accessible as Jane Jacob's "Death and Life of Great American Cities," less cerebral than "I am a Strange Loop," Steven Johnson covers emergent behavior across not only people, but extrapolating into the web and robotics space. That's singularity territory, and he walks you through the whole strand.

like · see review

« previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 … 99 100 next »

new topic
Discuss This Book

There are no discussion topics on this book yet. Be the first to start one »

Recommend it | Stats | Recent status updates

combine
Other Editions (8)

More editions...

Genres

Science

100 users

Non Fiction

70 users

Science > Technology

12 users

Philosophy

11 users

Sociology

8 users

Science > Popular Science

6 users

Culture

6 users

Philosophy > Theory

5 users

Science > Biology

5 users

Psychology

5 users

See top shelves...

Readers also enjoyed similar books

About Steven Johnson

Steven Johnson is the author of the bestsellers Where Good Ideas Come From, The Invention of Air, The Ghost Map, Everything Bad Is Good For You, and Mind Wide Open, as well as Emergence and Interface Culture. He is the founder of a variety of influential websites—most recently, outside.in—and writes for Time, Wired, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. He lives in Marin County, Califor...more

More about Steven Johnson...

Books by Steven Johnson

The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life

More…

Share This Book

Facebook Twitter Your website

Trivia About Emergence: The Co...

No trivia or quizzes yet. Add some now »

title link	preview: Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
avg rating	preview: Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software Goodreads rating: 3.94 (1352 ratings)
small image	preview: click here [close]
med image	preview: click here [close]
BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2296.Emergence?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1294786433l/2296.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2296.Emergence?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson[/url]

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software

Friend Reviews

Community Reviews

Share This Book

Share This Book on Your Website