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.

In fact, the very nature of an X-event is that it is both rare and surprising. So I would not say that any specific X-event is likely. What I would say, though, is that some X-event is not only plausible, but very likely in a time scale of a few years.

Once the reality sets in of a superhuman intelligence being in control of every aspect of the infrastructures we rely upon for everyday life, we will simply have to try to come to an accommodation with that entity.

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!

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.

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."

What distinguishes a mathematical model from, say, a poem, a song, a portrait or any other kind of "model," is that the mathematical model is an image or picture of reality painted with logical symbols instead of with words, sounds or watercolors.