Chapter by Andy Clark

In Chapter 6, Clark begins with example of the trails left behind by slugs and ants. As he explains how these trails have multiple functions such as making the production of the mucus trail to help other slugs not have to produce as much mucus, he relates how these paths can be related to humans. An example he used was Amazon.com. In this example he explained how Amazon used a pedestrian trick in that when he bought a certain CD by Nick Cave, it also recommended other CDs that other customers bought who also bought the Nick Cave CD. This method is an effective way to help customers open up to other CDs and other types of music. This technique of relating one person's interests to others is called collaborative filtering. Another way of thinking was created by our own Luis Rocha. This method was called "swarm intelligence." According to Rocha, "relatively dumb individual agents, such as ants and bees, create beautiful, complex, and life-enhancing structures by following a few simple rules and by automatically pooling their knowledge courtesy of chemical traces and structural alterations laid by their own activity" (Clark 48). With collaborative filtering, Norman Johnson believes that this filtering reveals similar characteristics such as to those pheromone-based groups.
Not only are stores now able to recommend what other types of music to listen to, but companies are now creating self-organizing webs. These self-webs is able to create, enchance, and disable links between pages as an automatic result of use (Clark 50). An example of this would be if several users moved from Amazon.com to Ebay.com and then to WorldofWarcraft.com, the web will create a direct line from Amazon to WorldofWarcraft. The web will also configure a prefered way you would want to it be displayed. This is a technique that search-engines such as Google have used to search for what the user desires.
Technology in my opinion has surpassed everyone's expectations. With these tools of relating one person's interests to another, companies have now been able to profit much more and consumers have been able to benefit much more as well. One thing I do contemplate is if such wonderful things will one day more harm than good at the rate technology is growing.