• The concept of emergence might be more useful than that of coincidence in explaining the world.



• Self-adaptive systems work in a top-down manner. They evaluate their own global behavior and change it when the evaluation indicates that they are not accomplishing what they were intended to do, or when better functionality or performance is possible.



• Self-organizing systems work bottom-up. They are composed of a large number of components that interact locally according to simple rules. The global behavior of the system emerges from these local interactions, and it is difficult to deduce properties of the global system by studying only the local properties of its parts.

A few random thoughts following this interesting talk. Firstly, noticed one of the few things he noticed was users producing their own aps, which I was suprised at. Secondly, his interest in not just software but software systems, and how these systems interacted and their emergent properties. So I though wow, there’s a whole world dependent on software (how he saw the next decade, and the one after as the Age of Machines so James Cameron again with his forthcoming CGI film is on the zeitgeist), this brings out a whole set of unpredictable emergent properties.

And god, I know the best brains in the business at the likes of MIT and Sante Fe are working on just these thoughts, but they are by their nature working within a certain mental framework. One which does not really allow full understanding of what emergent properties impact really means at a human level. Ah what the hell at least I’ve taken out my own form of insurance, through my studies on complexity/intuition/etc – but then I’ve ‘gone native’ with ‘no direction home’ and all the safer (counter-intuitively speaking) for it. Cheers Graddy.