Steven Johnson on "Emergence"
About Ants, Cities, AI, Games and much much more. Found at theshiftedlibrarian
"Sim City is the first example of that, in some ways: "We understand how little self-organizing systems work, so I can create a little software program that will simulate that on the screen, and it'll be fun, and I'll do it as a deliberate work of culture, not as a model of doing it in a lab."
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"I was thinking that what the Web needs is a big neo-cortex. There are all these very specialized smart, focused tools being developed, and data that's being mined, and collective intelligence on specific problems. But we're not as good yet at, not just filtering all that stuff, but figuring out what belongs connected to what else. Google is, in a way, the beginning of that. It's letting the Web solve that pattern itself, looking at patterns and links of what should be connected to other things. But we need more of that kind of synthesis going on. I think XML is going to be a great platform for that. Once you have clear, simple markup for describing big chunks of data, it should be easier to do that as well. "
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"Isn't Everquest supposed to have this economy that's the size of a small country? As these worlds that were designed to let people play Dungeons and Dragons in a virtual, networked environment, as they get more and more users, and as they develop an actual economy within that world, and as it translates into real-world dollars -- as people sell their characters on eBay and stuff like that -- are we actually, through that gaming design, is there an exaptation that leads to what the Internet was supposed to look like, a virtual world with commerce, a William Gibson-like system?"
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