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!

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.

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.

I think that in the immediate aftermath of a superhuman machine intelligence revealing itself, most people would feel very threatened but take solace in the thought that we can always pull the plug.

If you ask which of the scenarios I think is most dangerous, though, I will give a different answer. In that form of the question, I regard a nuclear attack, terrorist-generated or otherwise, as the most threatening combination of likelihood and long-term damage to modern life today.

At some point, the world is going to have to bite the bullet and accept a huge downsizing in its way of life to bring the assets-to-debt ratio back in touch with reality.

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."