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.

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.

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.

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!

To function effectively, the system scientist must know a considerable amount about the natural world AND about mathematics, without being an expert in either field. This is clearly a prescription for career disaster in today's world of ultra-high specialization.

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.

Trying to solve the problem by creating more debt is analogous to trying to stop being an alcoholic by going on a bender down at the corner bar.