February 27, 2003

Divergent Emergence

We are not ants! on Stephen Johnson's site is probably the best starting point for the whole "Emergent Democracy" online conversation that Joi Ito launched. I've avoided commenting on it so far because of the ironic fact that this conversation on emergence was divergent to the point that it feels impossible to keep track of where its going. The dialogue is splattered across the web and conference call "happenings" like it was created by an epileptic toddler with a paintball gun.

This interview with Eric Bonabeau cut through the abstraction beautifully. Suddenly it became clear that this sort of divergent behavior is an integral part of the process of emergence. The discussion Ito launched has proceed into all sorts of conversational tangents, paths, whirlpools and eddies. Most won't lead far, but one or two will develop into a strong idea path. The resulting concepts will have no clear author, but there is a good chance the ideas will be strong. The parallels to ants finding the closest food source are strong.

Of course as some people have hollered, humans are not ants. But its equally obvious that we are capable of emergent behavior. Whether you can call the results "intelligent" is another question entirely. The other big unknown is what happens when humans become self aware of our emergent behavior. Do we have the ability to realize our emergent paths and redirect them? It strikes as similar to Asimov's psychohistory and quite frankly I don't think we have the tools to answer the questions yet. That doesn't make it any less fascinating of course. We'll see where it all leads.

Posted by Abe at February 27, 2003 01:23 AM

Comments

It's funny, I just had a conversation about how it's getting harder to track these ideas (memes, whatever) once they're into the blogosphere. The person I was talking to wanted the ideas to stay "centralized" so that they could be kept up with more readily.

We talked for a while, but what we eventually decided was just what you said above: the ideas put forth on one site need to be free to travel around and spark other ideas on other Web sites in order for the emerging online system to develop.

Nice job putting it much more succinctly than we did. :)

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