Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, by Steven Johnson, started off a bit too glibly. His messianic enthusiasm for the results in the field felt a bit strange after the tempered practicality of real complex systems researchers such as Barabasi, Duncan Watts, and Kauffman. This might have been an entertaining first book to read about complex self organizing systems. The core ideas were not new to me (how pheromones work) but his descriptions of how the web is NOT showing emergence just go to show how quickly the internet has changed. He was betting his money on feedback systems like Alexa, even Alexa required users to buy into ONE invasive tool (for tracking browsing). Blogs and pingbacks are the new pheromones on the web and were completely unanticipated - which just goes to show how it is VERY difficult to predict anything. The principle that feedback is essential for a complex system still holds though.

Four essential features according to Johnson:
Neighbor interaction
Pattern recognition
Feedback
Indirect control

Other authors to follow up based on this book - historical complexity/cybernetics readings - Turing (morphogenesis), Shannon, Weiner, Selfridge, Weaver, Jacobs, Holland, Prigogine.