Changing things from the top down works when things are stable.

Any believable prediction will be wrong. Any correct prediction will be unbelievable.

It's more along the lines of raising a child: we train the system to a certain range of behaviors that we find most useful. But then we let it go, because we don't want to have to be babysitting it the whole time.

In a broad systems sense, an organism's environment is indistinguishable from the organism itself.

Technology is anything that doesn't work yet.

It has become evident that the primary lesson of the study of evolution is that all evolution is coevolution: every organism is evolving in tandem with the organisms around it.

The way to build a complex system that works is to build it from very simple systems that work.