Clockwork emergence is hard to get working in an open-ended way.

Emergence is where the pieces come together to form more than the sum of their parts.

Clockwork emergence is a kind of mechanistic emergence; the various gears have to fit precisely into their neighbors to be viable assemblages.

That requires precise engineering to unforgiving tolerances, which is expensive.

But it also means you need either a coordination force (so that different gears can land on the same, compatible interlinkages) and/or a massive swarm of different parts, constantly being particle collided, so that every so often a viable combination can be found.

And sometimes those mechanistically viable combinations cause harm.

Imagine a bit of data that looks for a "list of your favorite foods" and finds a document with a list of ingredients and plugs it in, but that document is titled "allergies". Uh oh!

LLMs allow a new kind of emergence, one you might call vibes-based emergence, or meaning-based emergence.

This emergence doesn't require mechanistic interlocking; the LLM can derive just-in-time adapter or glue code to allow pieces that never imagined the other to be joined together in a squishy way on demand.

For vibes based emergence, it's important for components to be able to be exapted; to be used in contexts their original creator never foresaw.