System theorists know that it's easy to couple simple-to-understand systems into a "super system" that's capable of displaying behavioral modes that cannot be seen in any of its constituent parts. This is the process called "emergence."

When the next big problem comes online, be it the Euro crisis, nuclear proliferation, an overstretched Internet, a killer flu, or any of the other possibilities I consider in X-Events, we will suffer a complexity overload.

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.

I do not believe that there is any person, method, or tool that can consistently and reliably predict specific human events, X- or otherwise.

If the group has a negative social mood, believing that tomorrow will be worse than today, the bias goes in the opposite direction. Instead of "welcoming" we have "rejecting," instead of "global" we tend to see events that are "local" and so forth.

I don't think the emergence of a superhuman intelligence would be at all catastrophic but much more likely to be beneficial - just as long as we don't start trying to interfere with it!

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.