The trick, of course, is to get from here to there without one of Cowan’s Class A global catastrophes. And if we’re to have any hope of doing that, said Gell-Mann, the study of complex adaptive systems is clearly critical. Understanding these six fundamental transitions means understanding economic, social, and political forces that are deeply intertwined and mutually dependent upon one another. You can’t just look at each piece of the problem individually, as has been done in the past, and hope to describe the behavior of the system as a whole. The only way to do it is to look at the world as
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