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  • Essay / Analysis of Self-Organizing Systems by Steven Johnson

    In the article “Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software,” Steven Johnson argues that self-organizational systems are made up of many interacting agents who are This is not individually intelligent. In this text, Johnson draws comparisons between ant colonies and the Internet; he underlines how complexity is organized from bottom to top, and how it results in a lack of hierarchy or rules, which are imposed on a minority system. However, there are basic rules that govern these local relationships which in turn coexist with the organization and emergence of a set of complex and sophisticated behaviors. Johnson connects the way ant colonies obey a simple set of rules they learn from each other to how they are able to produce an orderly working society. In the first chapter "Here Comes Everybody", he presents his theory that these self-organizing ant colonies systems are the result of the combination of many unintelligent interacting agents capable of combining into a highly intelligent system. He is able to relate these social structures to human society by examining how our cities are organized. It connects the work of Jane Jacobs in determining the patterns of ant colonies to the patterns sustained by cities over centuries,"Pattern Amplification Machine; its neighborhoods are a way to measure and express the repeated behavior of communities broader - capturing information about group behavior, and sharing that behavior with the group (Johnson 2001: 40) Johnson relates these ideas of emerging organizations to the development of the city Urban organization shows patterns formed by. lower-level interactions. While top-down organizations are present Whether agents or human individuals......middle of article......ion of models. of emergence, however, he lacks the reluctance to differentiate (weak when applying theories to modern technological advances) between spontaneous emergence and evolved systems in science. In conclusion, Johnson was able to connect much of the. current society today, it has given a better understanding and an introduction to a new field of thought and a new perception of modern society. world. “Emergence” has continued to educate and guide the course of daily life and determine how science and technology can relate to the modern world. It changes the reader's perception and constitutes a new field of thought and makes you look at subjects differently, through the functioning of a multitude of systems; it is a useful insight into an important process in contemporary life and could nevertheless be more academically rigorous in terms of information..