People do sometimes use philosophical terms like "intelligence" imprecisely, in confusion- and error-generating ways. But that is not the same sort of meaninglessness as Star Trek's mad libs. If you think something is that meaningless, and it didn't come from fiction, then you're probably missing something important.
"The morality of an act is an emergent phenomena of a physical system" means "It is possible in principle to produce a model and definition of morality in terms of a physical system". This is useless to people who want details of that model which could be used to classify actions as moral or not. It's kind of like answering "Where are my keys?" with "Your keys exist!". Useless, but certainly not meaningless; if someone instead told you, "Your keys do not exist!", then you'd infer the interesting-and-important fact that your keys had been destroyed. The implications of "morality is not an emergent phenomena of a physical system" would be considerably more abstract, philosophical, and difficult to translate into action, but there would be interesting implications.
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This is a reply to a comment by Yvain and everyone who might have misunderstood what problem I tried to highlight.
Here is the problem. You can't estimate the probability and magnitude of the advantage an AI will have if you are using something that is as vague as the concept of 'intelligence'.
Here is a case that bears some similarity and might shed light on what I am trying to explain:
The use of 'intelligence' is as misleading and dishonest in evaluating risks from AI as the use of 'tech' in Star Trek.
It is true that 'intelligence', just as 'technology' has some explanatory power. Just like 'emergence' has some explanatory power. As in "the morality of an act is an emergent phenomena of a physical system: it refers to the physical relations among the components of that system". But it does not help to evaluate the morality of an act or in predicting if a given physical system will exhibit moral properties.