Steven Johnson is editor-in-chief of FEED magazine and a pioneering digital culture futurist. Here's the scoop on his new book, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software.

What is Emergence?

Emergence is a tour of adaptive, self-organizing systems. These systems include many agents that are not terribly smart individually, but collectively they come up with intelligent higher-level behavior.

What do ants and software have in common?

Nobody is in charge of an ant colony, and yet ants behave in mind-bogglingly complex and nuanced ways, such as shifting roles among the colony members in response to changing needs.

Now our understanding of "bottom-up" intelligence is being channeled toward consumer-level software. A site like eBay is a wonderful example of bottom-up software, as is the book recommendation system. Amazon's software is pretty uncanny at recommending books you'll be interested in.

Your book's conclusion is dramatic. Is there peril in greater collective intelligence?

There's the danger of clusters of like-minded people becoming too insular. But on the whole, this will be a welcome change from our top-heavy, mass media systems. I'm not too worried about a tyranny of clubs. Certainly, it will be preferable to the tyranny of three television networks.