20 Quotes by John L. Casti

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.

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.

The world is awash in more debt than there is money enough in the world to liquidate it.

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.

If the group has a negative social mood, believing that tomorrow will be worse than today, the bias goes in the opposite direction. Instead of “welcoming” we have “rejecting,” instead of “global” we tend to see events that are “local” and so forth.

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.”

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.

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!