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