Emergence
The term originates in the science of complex adaptive systems. It is used by complexity scientists to describe the ways in which large numbers of relatively unintelligent agents can produce, through a massively iterated series of simple procedures, emergent forms of complexity that cannot be reduced to a simple enumeration of those constituent procedures. More iterations of the base level sub-routines produces a totally different kind of organization. In the words of Kevin Kelly, whose book "Out of Control" was one of the first major works on emergence to reach a cross-over public, with emergence 2+2 does not equal 4, nor does 2+2=5, in fact 2+2=apples.
Also explored in Steven Johnson's book *Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software* (Penguin, 2002); Malcolm Gladwell's *The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference* (Abacus 2002); Harold J.Morowitz, *The Emergence of Everything: How The World Became Complex* (Oxford, 2002); and John H.Holland, *Emergence: From Chaos to Order* (Oxford 2002).
Cf. Clifford Siskin, "More is different: literary change in the mid and late eighteenth century," in *The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660-1780* (Ed. by John Richetti. Cambridge, 2005), page 797-823, especially 819.
Larry Niven's 1973 short story Flash Crowd predicted the sudden phenomena of mobs as a result of the technology of teleportation.
In 2003, it turned out that the only technology needed for a
flash mob was the transmission of information-- facilitated by the cellular phone.
The Smart Mob predicts intelligent emergent phenomena through the technologies of transmission of information.
MIT Center For Collective Intelligence
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