Johnson Reading Assignment

In The Myth of the Ant Queen, Johnson focuses on a variety of concepts including intelligence, complexity, self-organization, and emergence. Of all of these, I think that the word self-organization best ties together both the other words as well as the “three” parts of the essay. Self-organization can be defined as a group’s ability to form sophisticated patterns or arrangements without an overseer/government. Johnson first describes this phenomena using ant colonies, where ants work independent of the ant queen (hence the title) and of any sort of pacemaker; they run their colony solely on their collective behavior. In the second example, Johnson explains how Manchester, an overpopulated city, exhibited self-organization by unconsciously separating the working class from the middle class. Without any regulators, the outwardly chaotic city developed an inward complexity in its streets. As Johnson puts it, “large patterns can emerge out of local uncoordinated actions” (199). In one of his final examples, Johnson explains self-organization with the example of Selfridge’s AI software. His goal was to create a process “which...can adaptively improve itself to handle certain pattern-recognition problems which cannot be adequately specified in advance” (205); this is the core of self-organization. Selfridge’s software, called Pandemonium, showcased a “bottom-up intelligence, and not a unified top-down one” (206); it essentially relied on small individual programs organizing themselves to process information for a larger specific purpose.

In comparison to Davidson’s writing, Johnson’s writing seems more complex and less colloquial. Both appear to be written to a general audience, but the way Johnson writes seems to indicate a more academic intended audience. While Davidson uses relatable narrative examples (iPod, girl with the green hair, Mrs. Davidson), Johnson uses more abstract examples. Aside from those difference, the two writings seem to share a lot in common. One reason I chose “self-organization” is because of its connection between the two texts. In the context of Project Classroom Makeover, the word “crowdsourcing” preaches the same message of  “ground-up” learning as “self-organization” does. Both concepts contrast with using expertise and regulators to achieve a goal. Another similarity I found is that both writers seem to leave their essays almost open-ended, especially Johnson. In her essay, Davidson leaves out a “solution” for crowdsourcing, how it will work in modern application. Even more so, Johnson allows the reader to interpret the connections between his examples of self-organization for application in modern society, a self-organizing task in itself.