>It fully ignores the potential for emergence.
There's two kinds of emergence, one scientific, the other a strange, vacuous notion in the absence of any theory and explanation.
The first case is emergence when we for example talk about how gas or liquid states, or combustibility emerge from certain chemical or physical properties of particles. It's not just that they're emergent, we can explain how they're emergent and how their properties are already present in the lower level of abstraction. Emergence properly understood is always reducible to lower states, not some magical word if you don't know how something works.
In these AI debates that's however exactly how "emergence" is used, people just assert it, following necessarily from their assumptions. They don't offer a scientific explanation. (the same is true with various other topics, like consciousness, or what have you). This is pointless, it's a sort of god of the gaps disguised as an argument. When Chomsky talks about science proper, he correctly points out that these kinds of arguments have no place in it, because the point of science is to build coherent theories.
>not some magical word if you don't know how something works.
I'd disagree, emergence is typically what we don't understand. When we understand it, it's rarely considered an emergent concept, just something that is.
>They don't offer a scientific explanation.
Correct, because we don't have the tooling necessary to explain it yet. Emergence as you stated came from simpler concepts at first, for example burning hydrogen and oxygen and water emerges from that.
Ecosystems are an emergent property of living systems, ones that we can explain rather well these days after we realized there were gaps in our knowledge. It's taken millions and millions of hours of research to piece all these bits together.
Now we are at the same place in large neural nets. What you say is pointless is not pointless at all. It's pointing at the exact things we need to work on if we want to have understanding of it. But at the same time understanding isn't necessary. We have made advancements in scientific topics that we don't understand.
> There's two kinds of emergence, one scientific
I am not aware of any scientific kind of emergence. There's philosophical emergence, and its counterpoint - ontological reductionism.
Most people have an intuitive sense that philosophical emergence is true, and that bubbles up in their writing, taken as an axiom that we're all supposed to go along with.
On closer inspection, it is not clear to me that this isn't simply a confusion or illusion caused by the tendency of the human mind to apply abstractions and socially constructed categories on top of complicated phenomena, and those abstractions are confused for actual effects that are different from the underlying base-level phenomena being described.
It is ontological emergence vs epistemological emergence, not philosophical vs ontological. Simply, ontic vs epistemic.
Nobody claims mistical gaps. There is no deus ex machina claim in emergence. However e.g. stable phenomena at a higher model level might be fully dynamic at a lower level model.