emergent

I think you are largely correct: it's an emergent pathology.

Maybe it's not even anyone being "evil", and it's just an emergent behaviour.

It's a collective emergent phenomenon that prints invoices.

Finally our system of laws are a combination of written text, and argued cases, and the sum of those is an emergent thing thought of as public policy.

More likely, it's an emergent property of the legal system in a democratic context that can probably be explained in terms of game theory.

The idea that Patrick's situation is unique is one of the dumbest and most damaging emergent memes on HN. Patrick is literally the textbook story of how to get to this point without having a unique circumstance.

Is it possible to quantify that sort of emergent complexity that happens in life, or in a work or story with artistic direction that takes on a life of its own?

The emergence of USB as The Way Phones are Charged didn't happen as a magic emergent property, but via considered government regulation.

The pathology is emergent, not by design, but our tolerance and even encouragement of it is definitely ideological in basis.

The Internet of things is more about swarms and emergent behaviors and less about turning everything into a tiny stand-alone version of our datacenter servers.

", it's an emergent consequence of that policy rule, auction-esque mechanisms for ad placement, and the measurable behavior of most people demographically similar to you, which is that they click on cleavage but buy virtually nothing as a result of Facebook ads.

In my own opinion the question is meaningless which is why I think consciousness is some kind of inevitable emergent property of intelligent systems; but of course there's thousands of philosophers out there tackling this very question so I won't pretend to have any original thoughts on it.