The Emergence of Emergence
17 hours ago Willis Eschenbach
I’ve been exploring the abilities of Artificial Intelligence, which I described in a previous post as “The World’s Dumbest Genius Librarian“. I read a curious suggestion as to how to use AI, which was what they called the “blank line” technique. This is where you give the AI (in my case perplexity.ai) a list of things with a blank line “______” at the end, and it fills in the blank. The example they gave in the suggestion I read was something like “I’m going camping, and I’m taking a tent, a sleeping bag, a hatchet, and ___”. So I tried it. Here, let me try it again right now so you can see what I mean. Hang on … OK, here’s what I got:
Me:
“I’m going camping, and I’m taking a tent, a sleeping bag, a hatchet, and ___”
Perplexity:
“Based on your camping list—tent, sleeping bag, hatchet—the next logical and essential item to bring would be a flashlight. A flashlight is crucial for safety and convenience in the outdoors, especially after dark, making it a natural addition to your camping essentials.”
So that’s the idea. Of course, I wasn’t interested in camping, but in climate. In particular, I wanted to find out more about my theory that emergent thermoregulatory climate phenomena are central to the surprising stability of global temperatures.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/06/21/the-emergence-of-emergence/
