Steven "Emergence" Johnson interviewed in the WELL's public conference:
The emergent systems that I talk about in the book are systems that
are made of many lower-level constituent parts, each of which follows
relatively simple rules of interaction and lacks an awareness of the
overall state of the system. Out of the semi-random exchanges of these
many agents, a higher level order arises: ants organize into colonies,
urban dwellers into neighborhoods. That movement from low-level
interaction to higher-level order is what we call emergence."Adaptive" is a key term as well — the systems I talk about are often
called "complex adaptive systems." I stressed the term quite a bit
because the systems that I'm interested in aren't just examples of
patterns emerging out of seemingly random interactions; they're often
patterns that are *good* for something. The emergent behavior of ant
colonies helps them pull off incredible feats of resource management
and engineering; neighborhood formation helps cities organize and store
collective information and makes them more intelligible spaces.
Sometimes that adaptive behavior is the result of an evolutionary
process (as in the ant colonies); sometimes it's the result of direct
human interaction (like some of the software programs I look at.) But
in all the adaptive systems there's some feedback mechanism pushing the
system towards a more efficient state…
