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.

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."

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.

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.

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

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.

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.