“Emergent behavior” at first suggests there is a pattern that only becomes obvious when many small seemingly insignificant interactions take place. The ant colony and Manchester are two examples that fit my initial impressions where because ants and humans act and behave a certain way, results such as the mathematically optimized midden and the social class divisions appear even without a leader or a plan. However, this understanding of emergent behavior ignores the fact that these interactions also stimulate growth and as a result, the patterns that emerge are not from a static function but rather a dynamic one. Taking the city example, at first Manchester divides itself among social classes because of the “unconscious, tacit agreement” that people abide by. However, as time passes people instead begin to congregate with one another more explicitly, forming concrete landmarks such as the Gay Village. Selfridge’s letter recognition program also takes advantage over the demons individual behavior to help the machine learn how to read words.
The concept of emergent behavior ultimately traces back to a collaborative effort - the idea that it is not a reaction, but rather a process. Emergent behavior has strong connections to the idea of crowdsourcing in Davidson’s article in that ultimately a group works together to achieve the goal. However, while emergent behavior happens without deliberation by the group members, crowdsourcing happens because the group members were deliberate. The ant colony divides into roles such as queen and workers without understanding the bigger purpose, but the Duke students all had their sights on the iPod. In both cases, the results are a cause of a foundation built from the bottom up by the components of the system - the people, rather than directed from the top down by experts and leaders.
You mention emergent behavior tracing back to a collaborative effort. This idea relates to how Lethem describes many arts having roots from other arts' influence. Overtime, these arts will influence each other and take elements from each other to create something new. One example from Lethem's text is how most of the original Disney cartoons were inspired by much less popular cartoons or stories. It is simply that Disney's take on the idea of those cartoons made them more popular than the original. The collaboration of Disney's and the original person's ideas ultimately made Disney's cartoons into what they are today.
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