Steven Johnson, "The Myth of the Ant Queen"

Steven Johnson is the founder and editor of one of the Web's earliest magazines, Feed, and the author of Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate (1997); Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (2001), from which "The Myth of the Ant Queen" is drawn, and, most recently, Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life (2004). Johnson's preoccupation throughout these works is with rethinking the nature of intelligence. Although it is common to think of intelligence as located in the individual-the outstanding student, the creative genius, the scientist at work in his lab-Johnson invites us to consider intelligence not as the property of an individual, but as a characteristic that emerges out of a system working as a whole. To illustrate this reconceptualization of intelligence, Johnson looks at complex systems, like ant colonies, cities, and software programs, and argues that in these contexts "intelligence" emerges in the absence of any central form of leadership or authority; the intelligence of the whole is created, rather, by individual agents-ants, people, subroutines-following what Johnson terms "local rules." By showing how decentralized, adaptive, self-organizing systems use lower-level thinking to solve higher-order problems, Johnson asks his readers to see the advent of the Internet itself not simply as an extension of human intelligence, but as a new frontier where the very nature of human intelligence is being transformed, one hyperlink at a time.  

Johnson acknowledges the difficulties involved in imagining intelligence in these terms. When filmmakers try to depict artificial intelligence, they envision a future where cyborgs look and think just like humans. Johnson predicts, though, that when there is a significant breakthrough in the effort to create artificial intelligence, the result "won't quite look like human intelligence. It'll have other properties in it, and it may be hard for us to pick up on the fact that it is intelligent because our criteria [are] different." In the current political environment, the importance of developing new criteria for describing intelligence should be clear: Decentralized terrorist networks work in the emergent ways Johnson describes, as did the residents of New York City in the wake of the attacks on the Twin Towers.  

Johnson, Steven. "The Myth of the Ant Queen." Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. New York: Scribners, 2001. 29-57.
Quote drawn from the O'Reilly Network.
Digital image drawn from Steven Johnson's home page.

Link to Explore:

http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/000230.html: A post from Johnson's own blog that describes his software-driven research process in detail and speculates about the future of search technology and intellectual collaboration.  

Question for Connecting:

• Do self-organizing systems manage, as time goes on, to insulate themselves from the influence of chance? Does chance continue to play a role, or does it actually become even more important? To explore these questions, you might consider the examples that Johnson provides-the ant colony, the city, and the development of the science of complexity. But you might also consider Edward Tenner's discussion of technology and unintended consequences. Although technology appears to make life safer and more stable, it also exposes us to "revenge effects." Does self-organization protect us from these effects, or might it make them more likely?

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