Last week we read the introduction and chapter 1 in the Steven Johnson book "Emergence." basically, emergence is higher level rules or orders being created through low-lever rules through behavior and interactions. The best example he gave of emergence was an ant colony. The ants all have their specific jobs, most notably protecting the “queen,” they do without any other ant directing them and all of those ants doing those jobs creates an extremely efficient community that is created from the bottom-up.
A more human related example of emergence can be seen in software and on the internet with sites like wikipedia. Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, making it a bottom-up program. Another good example that we worked with in class are the recommendations at amazon.com. When you create an account and start adding different products to your wish-list such as books, dvds, or music, amazon makes connections with other products they think you would like and make recommendations. I was pretty surprised how good it was with recommendations for myself. I also like that if something you don’t like shows, up you can remove it and amazon remember that continue to factor that choice in for future recommendations.
2 comments:
I like how you discussed how Amazon.com and Wikipedia are examples of bottom-up systems. Sam said in his blog, and I agreed, that maybe humans are just too smart to function in bottom-up systems. However, the popularity of Wikipedia and Amazon.com seem to prove otherwise. What do you think?
I think that we can make specific programs and whatnot bottom-up, however, in terms of whole cities I think it is hard for humans to function in bottom up systems because no one is always going to agree and everone wants to do their own thing. For that reason I thing we need someone to set up some sort of top down system.
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