Stephen Johnson, author of “Emergence” and founder of FEED, discusses self-organizing systems with Andrew Leonard in Salon today, and ruminates on what threats to human existence morph into in a decentralized, self-organizing world.

This is not exactly the topic of the book, but you get to the point where smaller clusters of people can have disproportionately large effects. For example, look at epidemic weapons. We could have a smallpox attack, where you just need a dense population base and suddenly a million people can be taken out by one guy with a backpack. That’s the bad news. The good news is, your odds of perishing in some kind of massively organized, state-sponsored, either internal genocide or giant war or even an influenza outbreak that happens kind of naturally, the chances of perishing in that are greatly diminished. So it’s like the good news is, your chance of being hurt or killed in some kind of mass event is greatly diminished and will continue to diminish, but if you do happen to draw the wrong straw, you are much more likely to have the blow inflicted by a small group of people rather than a nation. And you know, I’d still probably prefer those; I would love it if you didn’t have the bad news at all but that just may be the kind of bargain that we have struck.

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