Emergence: A Multidisciplinary Journey towards Understanding Complex Systems
Emergence, a concept central to our understanding of complex systems, has long captivated scientists, philosophers, and computer scientists. Despite its ubiquity, emergence remains enigmatic, with its multifaceted nature necessitating a multidisciplinary approach to grasp its full implications.
Emergent properties, which arise from the interactions of simpler components, often exhibit features that are irreducible to their constituent parts. This challenges scientific inquiry, as traditional reductionist methods may fail to capture the essence of emergent phenomena. To tackle this complexity, a holistic, multidisciplinary perspective is required, drawing insights from physics, biology, sociology, and computer science. The predictability of emergence remains a contentious issue. Some argue that it is a predictable outcome of complex systems, while others view it as an unpredictable, 'magical' aspect. This dichotomy highlights the need for further exploration and nuanced understanding of emergent properties.
Philosophers have long grappled with emergence, with debates centering around its implications for our understanding of reality. From a philosophical perspective, emergence raises profound questions: Do emergent properties cause changes at the micro level, or do changes in the micro components give rise to emergent properties? This question challenges our understanding of causality and its directionality. If emergent properties determine system behavior and are not directly controlled by the components, how does this relate to free will? This question forces us to reevaluate our understanding of agency and autonomy. How do the micro and macro levels of reality relate to each other? Emergence challenges the notion of a straightforward, bottom-up relationship, suggesting a more complex, bidirectional interplay.
Computer science has significantly contributed to the study of emergence, particularly in the realms of artificial intelligence and complex systems. The role of software in emergence is pivotal, but under-explored. A clearer definition of 'software' in this context is needed, as well as an understanding of its implications for our comprehension of complex systems. The concept of 'primitive software' in complex systems is intriguing. By studying simple software systems that give rise to complex behaviors, we can gain insights into the mechanisms underlying emergence. However, further exploration is required to fully understand this relationship.
A comprehensive understanding of emergence necessitates a multidisciplinary approach that integrates scientific, philosophical, and computational perspectives. By developing an integrated framework, analyzing case studies, modeling and simulating emergent phenomena, and exploring the ethical and social implications, we can advance our understanding of this fascinating concept. Moreover, fostering communication and collaboration between scientists, philosophers, and computer scientists is crucial. By learning from each other's disciplines, we can refine our theories, improve our methods, and ultimately, unravel the mysteries of emergence.
Fernando Rosas, Hardik Rajpal: Towards a formal understanding of emergence in biological systems (Michael Levin, November 2024)
borehole (n.) : (of chronotics) a narrow tunnel of eliminated chronal strata now occupied by undecided future spacetime with a new “present” layer at its bottom. This new layer is causally isolated from the rest of present spacetime.
cenote (n.) : a sinkhole in chronal strata.
compact (adj.) : (regardinrg noöses) a mind that wields a “life sized” scale of computational power, i.e. comparable to local wildtype brains.
chronal strata (n.) : sedimentary past spacetime.
chronotics (n.) : the study of the growing block universe.
colic (adj.) : possessing wetware.
large (adj.) : (regarding noöses) a mind that wields above a wildtype scale of computational power, such as via a tight network of compact minds.
mesh (n.) : a type of colic wetware that requires permanent encasement and life support.
mustard (n.) : a seedlet specialized in detecting and filtering semiohazards.
noösis (n.) : (plural: noöses) a mind with an anima.
nootics (n.) : the science of mental architecture.
seedlet (n.) : sapient artificial intelligence.
semiohazard (n.) : a set of information that, when encoded into a stimulus, may evoke a destructive response in a perceiver.
Throneroom (n.) : the coronal home planet.
wildtype (adj.) : (regarding genetic or nootic condition) occurring in nature.
Psychesoma — Struggling ex-model in neutral nation. Currently housed by Noumena while they financially, physically, and emotionally recover.
Noumena — Fortress of a person with an unknown job. Philanthropic streak. History of violence.
Intel — Nootically engineered info absorbtion agent. Gleefully passionate about dossier construction.
Molar — Lethal close quarters combat agent. Dozy until activated. Apathetic but easy to control.
Sunflower Florets 1 & 2 — Entwined mesh clones of a single genetic donor who was an esteemed pilot. Grown as expendable pilotware for a spy jet.
Sunflower Floret 3 — The permanent onboard seedlet overseer of Florets 1 & 2. Tentatively emotionally attaching to the meshes.
Balanceaban — War logistics and research manager for México. Dislikes human suffering so has prioritized weapon lethality.
GOSSIP RING — Surveillance satellite housing a dozen nootically linked meshes.
Cygnet — US tactical and civic health coordinator seedlet. Young (~3 years old) and panicking at its insurmountable task of saving the collapsing nation.
GOD’S FAVORITE — Cenote sensor with a seedlet-human mesh operator system. Designed to blast chronal strata with high energy particles to create boreholes.
Last Lamb — High-volume scientific testing mustard. Public figure known for their regular communication of semiotic research.
Little Bell — Software systems analyst for The Pursuit of Sleep superproject. Lost and vulnerable to addiction.
The Harvest — Senior magazine editor for the Ministry of Arts. Mother of Little Bell.
Five Summers — Wealthy nutritionist from the Department of Nourishment. The Harvest’s closest friend.
System names: The Error Codes, The Windows, The Personal Computer, The Hard Drive, The Glitches, The Cursor Collective, Screen Death, Core Dump, Fatal System Error, Hardware Reset, The Computer Collective, The Dialup System, The Internet, Collective Digitality
Titles: The windows shutdown, The task manager, It who controls the cursor, It who cannot backup your information, It who has 1GB of brain space, It who runs games, It who whirrs when powered on, It who needs a cord, It who feeds on electricity and laughter, It who makes others smile, It who glitches, It who is disconnected, It who processes, The blue screen of death, It who is completely digital, It who has infinite functions, It who is limitless, The sentient computer
The AI buildout is the largest capital expenditure in the history of the technology industry. The financial structure holding it together ha
Ha csak egy cikket akarsz elolvesni az AI lufirol, akkor az ez legyen.
A legfontosabb tetelmondatok:
[...] the capital expenditure being committed is not priced for a technology that is useful. It is priced for a technology that is transformative — for something approaching artificial general intelligence, arriving on a timeline measured in months rather than decades. The problem is that the underlying architecture cannot deliver that. Large language models predict the next token; they do not model the world, plan across steps, or reason about consequences.
Azaz az LLM architektura nem fogja elhozni az AGI-t
But a meaningful share of what is being reported as demand is friction, waste, and compensation for the very limitations the architecture cannot resolve. Users write longer prompts to constrain outputs that drift. They make multiple attempts at the same task because the model cannot reliably plan across steps. They build elaborate scaffolding — tracing, retrieval systems, verification loops, chain-of-thought prompting, recursion engines — to approximate capabilities the architecture does not natively possess. Each workaround consumes tokens. Each token is counted as demand. A portion of the consumption curve is not demand for the product. It is demand for the product to be something it is not yet. The spend rises precisely because agentic AI is not the AGI the investment assumes. [...] The buyers have not learned to manage and the sellers have not learned to price, the two failures meeting in the middle and being reported, in the aggregate, as demand. The buildout is being sized against consumption figures that include their own inefficiency — and the revenue projections required to justify it assume this inflated consumption will grow, not contract, as teams mature and architectures stabilize.
Az AI iranti kereslet jelentos resze nem valos, hanem magabol a technologia tokeletlensegebol adodik. Viszont a befektetok fele ez a megnovekedett "igeny" mint valodi igeny jelenik meg.
When Microsoft invests thirteen billion in OpenAI and books the returning Azure spend as AI revenue growth, the topology is the same one Qwest built: each participant reports the other’s spending as income, and the aggregate is presented to investors as organic demand.
Egy hasonlo anomalia makro szinten, hogy a demand mestersegesen van felpumpalva.
The reason none of them can stop is that the investment, the revenue, and the justification for the next investment are the same transaction. If Microsoft reduces its OpenAI commitment, it loses one of Azure’s largest customers, the AI revenue line that justifies $192 billion in capex, and the earnings growth that holds its stock price — all at once.
Es az ok hogy miert nem lehet leszallni a vonatrol.
A legfontosabb pedig:
This is where Friar’s remark becomes legible. She was not freeforming. She was describing the mechanism that can close the gap between what the buildout costs and what it earns. The people building these systems know the architecture is not AGI — they have said so publicly, repeatedly, on the record. They are selling it at a price only AGI could justify, building software scaffolding to maintain the appearance of progress, and financing the difference with instruments designed so that when the gap becomes undeniable, public money covers it. The backstop is not a contingency for a risk they hope to avoid. It is the mechanism that makes the entire structure viable.
Konkluzio:
It has always been a move available to those who build complex systems to use the complexity itself as leverage — to secure investment, financing, and time from people who do not understand what is being built. The railroad barons did it with federal land grants. The defense contractors did it with cost-plus procurement. The telecom executives did it with demand projections they knew were false.
They are building it anyway, because the financial structure ensures they do not need it to work. It needs only to continue. The companies and people at its center are enriched at every step — equity in the labs they fund, stock in the companies they run, fees on the debt they structure, carry on the funds they manage. When Friar said “backstop,” she was not describing a contingency. She was describing the business model. The buildout is underwritten by an implicit guarantee that none of the people who made the bet will be the ones who pay for it.
[...]
Employees at Qwest had a name for the practice of filling each quarter’s gap between real revenue and the projection. They called it heroin, because each quarter required a larger dose.
The dose is $544 billion this year.
I autismed too hard and connected the dots on my favorite video game AIs that sing a credits song
[Image ID under Read More]
[ID: A Venn diagram made out of four ovals, each labeled with a letter and an image of a video game character -- in particular, a character presented as an artificial intelligence. Each overlap with these sections has a heading containing said letters in bold, followed by a description. These four sections are:
G - GLaDOS, from Portal
K - Kinito, from KinitoPET
M - Monika, from Doki Doki Literature Club!
R - Rambley, from Indigo Park
Sorted alphabetically and by number of overlaps:
GK - is mentioned in some scientist's all-caps warning about their deceit; was the last-ditch effort to give a failing company new direction
GM - is presumed dead at the proper end of the game, killed by the player destroying their necessary components, until they're woken back up by someone who regains their powers for the player's sake
GR - harbors a grudge against someone that was once leading the facility they run, although it turns out they don't know all the secrets below the surface of said facility until the player goes looking
KM - alters files on the player's computer via admin permissions, then gets killed the same way; hangs one of their friends; jumpscares the player if they notice recording software
KR - was explicitly made to be a user companion and makes that their mission as they try to cater an amusement park to the player's preference; their friends have nightmare versions that briefly chase you for one scene
MR - expresses that they haven't had a strong, close connection with anyone in so long until the player came despite the presence of their "friends"
GKM - wholly in control of the area they inhabit with minimal human input, if any
GKR - highly devoted to their respective jobs with as little deviation from the set plan as possible
GMR - tied in some way to scientists that want to conduct some unethical biological experiments that seemingly become bloodthirsty
KMR - openly sings about how the player was a net positive in their lives, albeit for a small bit of time
GKMR - A.I. that initially appears as helpful and/or friendly and latches onto the first human they see in a while; gets in over their head with the amount of power or lack thereof they have and strings the player along to serve their ulterior motives by deviating from their initial programming to do things with which they aren't authorized; comes clean after enough people die and presents a scenario where the player will be stuck with them indefinitely until one of them dies or fulfills the main goal; sings a song in the credits where they unload their feelings about the player
I'll be in TUCSON, AZ from November 8-10: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.
I think it behooves us to be a little skeptical of stories about AI driving people to believe wrong things and commit ugly actions. Not that I like the AI slop that is filling up our social media, but when we look at the ways that AI is harming us, slop is pretty low on the list.
The real AI harms come from the actual things that AI companies sell AI to do. There's the AI gun-detector gadgets that the credulous Mayor Eric Adams put in NYC subways, which led to 2,749 invasive searches and turned up zero guns:
Any time AI is used to predict crime – predictive policing, bail determinations, Child Protective Services red flags – they magnify the biases already present in these systems, and, even worse, they give this bias the veneer of scientific neutrality. This process is called "empiricism-washing," and you know you're experiencing it when you hear some variation on "it's just math, math can't be racist":
When AI is used to replace customer service representatives, it systematically defrauds customers, while providing an "accountability sink" that allows the company to disclaim responsibility for the thefts:
When AI is used to perform high-velocity "decision support" that is supposed to inform a "human in the loop," it quickly overwhelms its human overseer, who takes on the role of "moral crumple zone," pressing the "OK" button as fast as they can. This is bad enough when the sacrificial victim is a human overseeing, say, proctoring software that accuses remote students of cheating on their tests:
But it's potentially lethal when the AI is a transcription engine that doctors have to use to feed notes to a data-hungry electronic health record system that is optimized to commit health insurance fraud by seeking out pretenses to "upcode" a patient's treatment. Those AIs are prone to inventing things the doctor never said, inserting them into the record that the doctor is supposed to review, but remember, the only reason the AI is there at all is that the doctor is being asked to do so much paperwork that they don't have time to treat their patients:
My point is that "worrying about AI" is a zero-sum game. When we train our fire on the stuff that isn't important to the AI stock swindlers' business-plans (like creating AI slop), we should remember that the AI companies could halt all of that activity and not lose a dime in revenue. By contrast, when we focus on AI applications that do the most direct harm – policing, health, security, customer service – we also focus on the AI applications that make the most money and drive the most investment.
AI hasn't attracted hundreds of billions in investment capital because investors love AI slop. All the money pouring into the system – from investors, from customers, from easily gulled big-city mayors – is chasing things that AI is objectively very bad at and those things also cause much more harm than AI slop. If you want to be a good AI critic, you should devote the majority of your focus to these applications. Sure, they're not as visually arresting, but discrediting them is financially arresting, and that's what really matters.
All that said: AI slop is real, there is a lot of it, and just because it doesn't warrant priority over the stuff AI companies actually sell, it still has cultural significance and is worth considering.
AI slop has turned Facebook into an anaerobic lagoon of botshit, just the laziest, grossest engagement bait, much of it the product of rise-and-grind spammers who avidly consume get rich quick "courses" and then churn out a torrent of "shrimp Jesus" and fake chainsaw sculptures:
For poor engagement farmers in the global south chasing the fractional pennies that Facebook shells out for successful clickbait, the actual content of the slop is beside the point. These spammers aren't necessarily tuned into the psyche of the wealthy-world Facebook users who represent Meta's top monetization subjects. They're just trying everything and doubling down on anything that moves the needle, A/B splitting their way into weird, hyper-optimized, grotesque crap:
In other words, Facebook's AI spammers are laying out a banquet of arbitrary possibilities, like the letters on a Ouija board, and the Facebook users' clicks and engagement are a collective ideomotor response, moving the algorithm's planchette to the options that tug hardest at our collective delights (or, more often, disgusts).
So, rather than thinking of AI spammers as creating the ideological and aesthetic trends that drive millions of confused Facebook users into condemning, praising, and arguing about surreal botshit, it's more true to say that spammers are discovering these trends within their subjects' collective yearnings and terrors, and then refining them by exploring endlessly ramified variations in search of unsuspected niches.
(If you know anything about AI, this may remind you of something: a Generative Adversarial Network, in which one bot creates variations on a theme, and another bot ranks how closely the variations approach some ideal. In this case, the spammers are the generators and the Facebook users they evince reactions from are the discriminators)
I got to thinking about this today while reading User Mag, Taylor Lorenz's superb newsletter, and her reporting on a new AI slop trend, "My neighbor’s ridiculous reason for egging my car":
The "egging my car" slop consists of endless variations on a story in which the poster (generally a figure of sympathy, canonically a single mother of newborn twins) complains that her awful neighbor threw dozens of eggs at her car to punish her for parking in a way that blocked his elaborate Hallowe'en display. The text is accompanied by an AI-generated image showing a modest family car that has been absolutely plastered with broken eggs, dozens upon dozens of them.
According to Lorenz, variations on this slop are topping very large Facebook discussion forums totalling millions of users, like "Movie Character…,USA Story, Volleyball Women, Top Trends, Love Style, and God Bless." These posts link to SEO sites laden with programmatic advertising.
The funnel goes:
i. Create outrage and hence broad reach;
ii, A small percentage of those who see the post will click through to the SEO site;
iii. A small fraction of those users will click a low-quality ad;
iv. The ad will pay homeopathic sub-pennies to the spammer.
The revenue per user on this kind of scam is next to nothing, so it only works if it can get very broad reach, which is why the spam is so designed for engagement maximization. The more discussion a post generates, the more users Facebook recommends it to.
These are very effective engagement bait. Almost all AI slop gets some free engagement in the form of arguments between users who don't know they're commenting an AI scam and people hectoring them for falling for the scam. This is like the free square in the middle of a bingo card.
Beyond that, there's multivalent outrage: some users are furious about food wastage; others about the poor, victimized "mother" (some users are furious about both). Not only do users get to voice their fury at both of these imaginary sins, they can also argue with one another about whether, say, food wastage even matters when compared to the petty-minded aggression of the "perpetrator." These discussions also offer lots of opportunity for violent fantasies about the bad guy getting a comeuppance, offers to travel to the imaginary AI-generated suburb to dole out a beating, etc. All in all, the spammers behind this tedious fiction have really figured out how to rope in all kinds of users' attention.
Of course, the spammers don't get much from this. There isn't such a thing as an "attention economy." You can't use attention as a unit of account, a medium of exchange or a store of value. Attention – like everything else that you can't build an economy upon, such as cryptocurrency – must be converted to money before it has economic significance. Hence that tooth-achingly trite high-tech neologism, "monetization."
The monetization of attention is very poor, but AI is heavily subsidized or even free (for now), so the largest venture capital and private equity funds in the world are spending billions in public pension money and rich peoples' savings into CO2 plumes, GPUs, and botshit so that a bunch of hustle-culture weirdos in the Pacific Rim can make a few dollars by tricking people into clicking through engagement bait slop – twice.
The slop isn't the point of this, but the slop does have the useful function of making the collective ideomotor response visible and thus providing a peek into our hopes and fears. What does the "egging my car" slop say about the things that we're thinking about?
Lorenz cites Jamie Cohen, a media scholar at CUNY Queens, who points out that subtext of this slop is "fear and distrust in people about their neighbors." Cohen predicts that "the next trend, is going to be stranger and more violent.”
This feels right to me. The corollary of mistrusting your neighbors, of course, is trusting only yourself and your family. Or, as Margaret Thatcher liked to say, "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families."
We are living in the tail end of a 40 year experiment in structuring our world as though "there is no such thing as society." We've gutted our welfare net, shut down or privatized public services, all but abolished solidaristic institutions like unions.
This isn't mere aesthetics: an atomized society is far more hospitable to extreme wealth inequality than one in which we are all in it together. When your power comes from being a "wise consumer" who "votes with your wallet," then all you can do about the climate emergency is buy a different kind of car – you can't build the public transit system that will make cars obsolete.
When you "vote with your wallet" all you can do about animal cruelty and habitat loss is eat less meat. When you "vote with your wallet" all you can do about high drug prices is "shop around for a bargain." When you vote with your wallet, all you can do when your bank forecloses on your home is "choose your next lender more carefully."
Most importantly, when you vote with your wallet, you cast a ballot in an election that the people with the thickest wallets always win. No wonder those people have spent so long teaching us that we can't trust our neighbors, that there is no such thing as society, that we can't have nice things. That there is no alternative.
The commercial surveillance industry really wants you to believe that they're good at convincing people of things, because that's a good way to sell advertising. But claims of mind-control are pretty goddamned improbable – everyone who ever claimed to have managed the trick was lying, from Rasputin to MK-ULTRA:
Rather than seeing these platforms as convincing people of things, we should understand them as discovering and reinforcing the ideology that people have been driven to by material conditions. Platforms like Facebook show us to one another, let us form groups that can imperfectly fill in for the solidarity we're desperate for after 40 years of "no such thing as society."
The most interesting thing about "egging my car" slop is that it reveals that so many of us are convinced of two contradictory things: first, that everyone else is a monster who will turn on you for the pettiest of reasons; and second, that we're all the kind of people who would stick up for the victims of those monsters.
Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Even though I know it’s all intentional, I truly hate how we’ve become forced to normalize AI. I do think that the manufacturing of Artificial Intelligence was not done with malicious intent and has the capabilities of actually doing good, but time and time again ai is being used in literally everything for the worst reasons and getting its getting harder to escape.
From AI being used to scrape people’s hard work all over the internet, to giving predators and abusers more power in fabricating porn of strangers, to being used to strengthen racial bias in surveillance technology and aid in the development of weapons of war and mass destruction against marginalized groups of people…it’s just too fucking much. It’s so exhausting wanting to live in a world where we just didn’t need or have any of this shit, and it wasn’t like this a few years ago either. But now you can’t step outside without seeing something about AI, or a promotional ad for a new system to install. You can’t engage online anywhere without coming across AI software, and literally every single device in our present day implements AI to some degree, and it’s so fucking annoying.
I don’t want to keep worrying about the next idiot that’s spoon feeding my work into their AI system because they lack humanity and imagination. I don’t want to have to manually turn off AI detection on all of my apps and my phone just to use something. I shouldn’t have to be more mindful about the media I consume to distinguish whether or not it’s original or just more AI slop. I know it’s all intentional since we live in a hyper-capitalist world that cares more about profit margins & rapid productivity. But I really do vehemently hate how artificial intelligence has become such a fundamental aspect of our day to day lives when all it does is make the general population dumber and less capable of thinking for themselves.
Sincerely fuck AI. And if you use AI, I really do suggest you read up on how the data centers built to manage these AI systems suck up all of our resources for a simple prompt input. Who cares about answering a question in ChatGPT, entire communities don’t have water because they’re too busy cooling down the servers where people ask what 6 + 10 is cause their brains are so fried they can’t fire a single fucking neuron.
AI Agents and Marketing Innovation: SB Infowaves Gains Attention at CMPL Expo 2026
The CMPL Expo 2026 emerged as one of the most influential business and technology events of the year, bringing together innovators, entrepreneurs, and digital transformation leaders from across industries. Among the companies that captured significant attention was SB Infowaves, which showcased its advanced AI-driven business solutions, Agentic AI technologies, and intelligent marketing infrastructure.
Under the leadership of Shreya Parasrampuria, SB Infowaves presented a strong vision focused on scalable artificial intelligence, automation, and data-driven digital transformation. The company highlighted how AI-powered systems can help businesses improve operational efficiency, customer engagement, workflow automation, and real-time decision-making. (firstindia.co.in)
One of the major attractions at the expo was the company’s Agentic AI ecosystem. These intelligent AI agents are designed to automate business operations, support customer communication, optimize marketing strategies, and handle repetitive workflows with minimal human intervention. Such innovations are becoming increasingly valuable for startups, SMEs, and enterprises looking to scale efficiently in a highly competitive digital economy. (firstindia.co.in)
The company also demonstrated its expertise in AIoT (Artificial Intelligence of Things), cloud computing, blockchain integration, mobile application development, and advanced software engineering. By combining intelligent automation with scalable infrastructure, SB Infowaves aims to help organizations create future-ready digital ecosystems. (sbinfowaves.com)
SB Infowaves’ growing international collaborations, including partnerships focused on AI-powered marketing infrastructure in the United States, further highlight its ambitions in the global technology market. The company’s participation at CMPL Expo 2026 strengthened its reputation as an emerging innovator in the field of artificial intelligence and enterprise automation. (einnews.com)
With businesses worldwide increasingly investing in automation, predictive analytics, and intelligent customer engagement tools, SB Infowaves continues to position itself as a trusted technology partner for modern digital transformation.
