Emergence

I found Johnson’s examples and insight of emergent software to be very
interesting and provocative. Around pg. 170, Johnson discusses Danny
Hillis’ attempt at writing emergent software that can improve itself
with time to eventually be efficient at sorting numbers. In order to
make the end result as efficient as possible, Hillis had to introduce
“predators” into the system in order to weed out programs that took
too many steps to sort the numbers.

I couldn’t help thinking if perhaps we humans are trapped in a “false
peak in the fitness landscape”, as described by Johnson. Of course, in
order to make this assertion, there needs to be a predefined goal for
mankind to achieve. Assuming that there is a goal to achieve, are we
as a whole continuing to develop and evolve to better achieve this
goal? Or have we instead stuck in a rut where we are content to exist
the way we do? In answering this, both social and biological evolution
should be considered.

I personally believe that we are still evolving socially, as shown by
the emergence of macro behavior in cities; however, it appears that we
are no longer ruled by biological evolution. I think the main question
is will we eventually be limited in social evolution as a result of
the absence of biological evolution.

Before this class and reading the first half of the book, I have never thought of looking beyond the obvious in certain aspects of life. I figured things behave the way they do because it just does, nothing more to it. But the book by Steven Johnson led me to look at things from a different angle. It doesn’t mean I will completely change my ideas, but at least I have a better understanding of why he sees things the way he does. I did felt that in certain parts of this book, things got dragged out longer than they should have been. The descriptions in the city section were helpful but could be overkill in the details department. I did not really find that portion of the book really interesting but he did point of some facts that are very true when looking at a city. Some parts do remain as the slums and other parts do transform into upscale living. The myth about the Queen Ant and how their colony function was what caught my attention. I found it interesting that these ants got no instructions from some higher authority ant to perform certain tasks. On the contrary, their actions were all pre-wired and individualized tasks that needed to be done were as natural as breathing for us. As for the discussion we had in class, I personally think a city can’t learn by it self. Yes it can evolve through many many years but it is only possible when there are humans involve to initiate these changes or if some kind of big natural event occurs. If cities had a mind of its own then life on earth would be chaotic.

The idea of emergence is one that I have a hard time wrapping my brain around. I would like to say that this book has helped me to understand but at some points I find myself with more questions than definite answers. A book like Emergence is definitely one of those books that needs group discussing.
It’s amazing to me that Steven Johnson has found one word that seems to connect a number of ideas. To be honest when I think of city structure my first thought is not ant colonies or the media. But though reading Emergence I am definitely starting to see and somewhat understand the connections. One of our class discussions revolved around this idea that emergence is the idea of a system forming from the bottom up. An ant colony is a huge system that runs from the bottom up. The ant’s within the system have no real way of communicating but yet somehow keep their huge colony runs smoothly. They individually make changes that collectively change the system as a whole. The parts change the system instead of the system changing the parts.
Gennifer Flowers, to be honest before reading this book I had never heard of her, but she holds a great deal of responsibility in why the media of my era is the way it is. Her story shifted the top down system of new broadcasting to a bottom up system. (Since we all read the book I’m not going to really go into details about the case.) The important idea is that, the heads of the system thought her story was not news worthy and choose to blow it off and just move on, but a local news station aired it and the story became news. Steven Johnson writes in Emergence “In the hierarchical system of old, the network heads could willfully suppress a story if they thought it was best for the American people not to know, but that privilege died with Gennifer Flowers, and not be because of lower standards or sweeps week. It was a casualty of feedback.” And the feedback was so strong that the original repressors of the story found themselves airing the story they had once thought non news worthy. Can feedback = emergence? Is that the connection Steven Johnson was trying to make?
Steven Johnson goes on in the book to mention that when the parts start to call the shots instead of the system as a whole, emergent behavior is starting. The Gennifer Flowers news story was the starting point for the emergence of a new kind of media.
Look at what happened when Michael Jackson died. People went crazy and the media followed. For a complete month every news station ran stories about his death everyday, all day. Don’t get me wrong I love Michael and he definitely was a world icon, but many days I kept wondering what else is going on out in the world. Other things definitely had to be going on. But the media feed into the people frenzy, and more coverage kept popping up. Positive Feedback drove the media coverage.
Feedback loops like this have outgrown just the news world. Is Gennifer Flowers the one to blame for the many reality tv shows out there? I really don’t care what Paris Hilton is wearing and quite frankly in my opinion Jon and Kate should not be household names. But I think I am the odd one out in the entertainment/media system, right? If the media is working on a feedback system then the reason we have so many reality shows is because there was a demand for them. Somewhere along the line we as a society established that we cared about all this non sense. Society put out the demand for magazines like US weekly and People, we created the demand the media had to supply the product.
I’m left wondering if this new system will ever change. And what can emerge out of it.
Sorry if this is not blog worthy…

I found the information about what role the ages of ant colonies plays particularly interesting, especially in light of our class discussion on Cellular Automata (bear with me on this one), and whether or not free will/won’t really exists.

When we had discussed the idea of everything we do being a result of a preset order, or chemical reactions, the very philosophical idea had struck me: what if the universe itself is forming under the rules of some sort of giant cellular automata (again, please bear with me) that has, at this point at time, followed its particular rules to form what we see now. But, it also struck me, the ages of ant colonies could pose a counter-argument to that entire idea. As I mentioned in my comment on Bethie’s post, the difference between younger colonies and older colonies gives good insight on the debate of whether what we do is determined by consciousness and whether or not that consciousness can learn.

If learning is something that both humans and ant colonies really do, it’s not a large jump to say that cities can as well; in order for an ant colony to learn, each of the individual pieces must learn something, and somehow pass it on, either verbally, or through pheromone paths. So, for a city to  learn, its individual parts and pieces must also learn, and communicate what they have learned to other generations, so that they may continue the growth and development without having to re-learn knowledge learned by dwellers (in colony or city) previous.

All of this may be drawn totally out of thin air, so please let me know what you all think either way. It’s my personal belief that cities, insects, and humans all learn and grow in a similar manner — maybe similar because of chance, or maybe because learning is in itself a predictable process.

As I was reading Emergence, one particular passage grabbed my attention. On page 127, Johnson is drawing comparisons between the Internet as an emergent system and the human brain. He describes how new software is scanning the connections in the surfing behaviors of internet users. These methods depend not on the actual content being read, but on the complex relationships between different sites. He then compares this to how the human brain functions — since the firing of neurons is relatively slow compared to the circuitry of a computer, our brains don’t think about things linearly – instead, it’s an enormously parallel machine that looks for underlying patterns.

If millions of different pieces of software do this pattern matching just like human neurons do, how does that change our view of the Internet as, perhaps, a emergent entity? I believe that one of the important differences between that pattern-matching is that there is no real connection between the software that scours the internet. The greatest strength of our brains is that the overheads of parallel processing – the time it takes to communicate, how to pass information, what to do with idle processors (neurons) – are nearly invisible, simply through the the millions of years of evolution. On the other hand, the software we have is created by humans. Communication and what to do with the data must be guided and filtered by human hands – and the sheer complexity of the task is no small thing. These multitudes of programs be truly emergent until real, unforeseen behaviors arise. Perhaps it can learn and guess at which websites will be popular.

As software that crawls the internet grows more complex, I think we’ll see more interesting trends emerge from the woodwork. The software that deals with interconnections between websites effectively have the ability to predict whether a new website will be popular or not – and beyond that, they have the necessary information to perhaps create a new, popular website. If this software begins to create it’s own internet pages…well, that may be a spark of something interesting.