My own guess is that quite quickly the machine intelligence will start dreaming machine dreams and thinking machine thoughts, both of which would totally incomprehensible to us. This would then lead to each species, we and the machines, moving off on to its own separate life trajectory.

From the 1990s onward, the financial sector created a vast array of instruments designed to separate investors from their money, financial derivatives of an ever-increasing level of complexity. At some point, this complexity reached a point where even the creators of the derivatives themselves didn't understand them.

The global financial system consists of firms in the financial services sector - banks, hedge funds, insurance companies and the like - and various governmental agencies who are charged with regulating these firms.

A good analogy is stretching a rubber band. You can stretch and stretch and even feel the tension increase in the muscles in your hands and arms as the gap from one end of the band to the other widens. But at some point you reach the limits of elasticity of the band and it snaps. The same thing happens with human systems.

The world is awash in more debt than there is money enough in the world to liquidate it.

We see an ever-increasing move toward inter and trans- disciplinary attacks upon problems in the real world ... The system scientist has a central role to play in this new order, and that role is to first of all understand ways and means of how to encode the natural world into "good" formal structures.

Resilience, timing, adaptation - these are the three pillars upon which the emergent properties of interacting systems rest. When the systems are the economy and the environment, understanding of the relationships among these concepts is crucial. This volume does a better job of explaining how to manage both money and nature to ensure humanity's long-term future than any other work I know of. Read and reflect.