Alex Krupp wrote:
So after finishing this book I have been thinking a lot about emergence in general. Wikipedia displays emergent properties because each article is better than the contribution of each individual. Similarly, ants display emergence because an ant colony can accomplish things that each individual ant cannot even conceive.
I haven't read the book so please fill me in. Isn't the Wikipedia an example of collaboration, not emergence? Emergence implies that the large-scale behaviour is qualitatively different than the small-scale behaviour. Wikipedia is composed of many articles, which are all similar to each other. You'd be hard-pressed to tell whether a given article is written by a single dedicated person or by a dozen. Its popularity is proportional to its size, the value of the whole is roughly equal to the sum of the articles. Where is the qualitative difference?
I know complexity theory is in vogue, it's tempting to rebadge an ancient concept such as collaboration in terms of something new. But to call it "emergence" seems to reduce the many intelligent people who knew exactly what they wanted to create and who set out to create it, to a mere colony of ants.
-- Tim Starling