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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The unfolding time for the end of globalization or a worldwide deflation is much longer, certainly measured in years, if not decades.

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.