Steven Johnson Reading Assignment

Johnson's essay, The Myth of the Ant Queen revolves around the idea of systems that are self-organizing and "emergent". Johnson uses the word "emergent" throughout his essay as the basis for the various places his ideas and research take him. Johnson introduces this novel idea of emergent behavior with the example of ant colonies. He introduces Deborah Gordon and writes that she, "focuses on the connection between the microbehavior of individual ants and the overall behavior of the colonies themselves, and part of that research involves tracking the life cycles of individual colonies, following them year by year as they scour the desert floor for food, competing with other colonies for territory, and-once a year-mating with them. She is a student, in other words, of a particular kind of emergent, self-organizing system." From here on out, Johnson takes the role of the student and shows various kinds of emergent systems. Johnson then delves into an example of how Manchester is an example of an emergent system. He supports this by citing how Manchester had no real urban planning and by quoting Friedrich Engels, who finds that the separation of the classes in the city seems highly systematic, but at the same time natural. Engels, however does not believe that this organization is completely without "pacemaker". The pacemakers he believes are the "liberal industrialists, the Manchester 'bigwigs'". Johnson goes on to use the word emergent to introduce complexity. The one sentence which really resonated with me was, "The city is complex because it overwhelms, yes, but also because it has a coherent personality, a personality that self-organizes out of millions of individual decisions, a global order built out of local interactions." It succinctly described for me the charm of the great metropolises of the world, how the bustling energy of a bazaar in New Delhi lent to not only its complexity, but its rich and vibrant personality. The look into complexity continues with Alan Turing and his work on emergence with respect to computer science and mathematics. Patterns are at the core of understanding this complexity, whether it be for the "pattern-amplifying machine" Engels analyzed or the "information in noisy communication channels" that Shannon and Turing worked on. The emergence at the beginning of the passage shifted focus to complexity and then to organized complexity, which then draws a parallel with Davidson's iPod experiment. The paradigm shift mentioned in The Ant Queen, a focus on research shifting from top-down to bottom-up mirrors the educational approach Davidson takes by distributing iPods on Duke University's campus. The students take a more hands-on approach to learning through the iPod experiment instead of leaving their education solely in the hands of University superiors. As Johnson writes that "There is a world of difference between a computer that passively receives the information you supply and a computer that actively learns on its own.", I replace the word computer in my mind with student and the sentiment it echoes is suddenly the same as Davidson's Project Classroom Makeover. The essay used the word emergence as the underlying theme in each of the authors examples, from the relatively small ant colony to the machine learning world of computers. By using these examples Johnson shows us how emergence lies everywhere. The demons in his example of pandemonium are not limited to the world of computer science or artificial intelligence. He argues that such demons are the underlying force behind evolution and that "The world now swarms with millions of his [Selfridge's] demons." Johnson cleverly developed the seemingly narrow example of emergence in an ant colony and gave the us, the readers, ample food for thought when considering the seemingly abstruse concept of emergence.