Entry 18 of 44
Emergent / Emergence
emergere — to rise up, come forth; e + mergere (to dip, plunge)
Latin
From Latin emergere: to rise out of, to come forth from. In philosophy: properties that arise from complex systems that are not predictable from or reducible to component properties.
Established meaning
In complexity science and philosophy of mind: genuine emergence means a property that cannot be predicted from or reduced to the system's components. Emergence implies genuine novelty at a higher level of organization — not merely complexity.
AI industry deployment
'Emergent capabilities' in LLMs: abilities that appear at scale without explicit training. Used to describe sudden performance discontinuities on benchmarks. Recent research has challenged whether these are genuine emergence or artifacts of measurement methodology.
Semantic gap
Genuine unpredictability
Calling capabilities 'emergent' implies they could not have been foreseen — transferring risk from developers to the abstract process of emergence. If 'emergent' harm occurs, the framing preemptively deflects developer responsibility.