Emergence – Steven Johnson
Carlos Daniel Gómez

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This text starts explaining the behavior of an ant and how they influence the world moving big amounts of soil, helping the growing of plants, etc. It says that ants are social insects and that they work perfectly coordinated in their colonies. In the ants colonies do not exist someone in charge and every member do their work, well done but also in the most effective way. The author make five important statements that can be applied to the city understanding the colonies as neighborhoods:

I – More is different. Here Johnson explains that is hard to read the patterns of the behavior of ants just reading one or ten ants, but when you start reading a thousand of them you can really start understanding the real world of this insects.

II – Ignorance is useful. The author says that is better a simple system that give basic results, than a complex system that give more results but with flaws, and an example of this are computers that actually work with binary code, 1s and 0s.

III – Encourage Random Encounter. This means encouraging the interaction between different societies (colonies in this case) to start obtaining more information for getting unexpected results.
IV – Look for patterns in sign. Ants, for example, when they start a new colony they start investigating they new territory, but after that ants find the most effective way to do what they need, for example looking for food. When this happens you can start reading patterns to really understand the colonies.

V – Pay attention to your neighbor. No human, animal or plant being can survive as individual but it does as a group. Exchanging information and interactions are as needed as oxygen.

The text indicates that a neighborhood is the result of a formation of colonies, where the interaction and exchange of information is one of the main “bricks”. He says that sidewalks is the main space for this activities in this neighborhoods.

As a conclusion I’d like to point out how ants act and work in the best way lacking a brain. Humans have brains and our response to everything is selfish and lazy. ¿What if we use our brains to act like ants?. “Intelligence is a measure for evolutions”.