Emergence (book review)
“The movement from low-level rules to higher-level sophistication is what we call emergence.” There you go, this book explained.
While slightly exaggerated, this does reflect what the book comes down to. Emergence takes examples from ant colonies, cities, and online communities, to explain how this concept works.
Through their individual actions, those at “street level” contribute to the seemingly complex, overarching system they’re part of. Often, the individual members of the system are not aware how their decisions influence and shape the outcome at the higher, system level. Each decision a member takes communicates information about the system to those around them, and in turn influences their decisions:
“Ant colonies rely heavily on the random interactions of ants exploring a given space without any predefined orders. Their encounters with other ants are individually arbitrary, but because there are so many individuals in the system, those encounters eventually allow the individuals to gauge and alter the macrostate of the system itself.”
For example, ants decide what task to take on (foraging, nest-building, trash collecting) within the colony, based on the amount of other ants they ran into over the past hour doing a specific task. From this information (e.g., “I ran into a lot of foragers over the past hour”), they instinctively know what to do, instead of needing to receive orders from a higher level. At the same time, this individual action contributes to the survival and organization of the colony, even though the ant itself has no idea how it contributes to that higher level system.
A similar thing happens in the human body, as well as cities, online communities, and many other self-organizing systems.
So is this book worth your time? Well, it depends. To me, it was an interesting read, but I didn’t feel entirely satisfied at the end. Perhaps that was because I was familiar with a lot of the ideas in this title from reading other books, perhaps I had expected a more practical framework or guidelines on how to apply the concept of Emergence to aspects of your daily life or work. I’m not entirely sure what it was, but the ending felt abrupt and incomplete to me.
That is not to say you should skip this book: if you’re not familiar with anything I wrote above or the topic deeply fascinates you, this will surely be an intriguing read that’s worth your time.
Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
Rating: 2/5
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