“And now suppose it’s really true that coevolving, complex systems get themselves to the edge of chaos,” he says. “Well, that’s very Gaia-like. It says that there’s an attractor, a state that we collectively maintain ourselves in, an ever-changing state where species are always going extinct and new ones are coming into existence. Or if we imagine that this really carries over into economic systems, then it’s a state where technologies come into existence and replace others, et cetera. But if this is true, it means that the edge of chaos is, on average, the best that we can do. The ever-open
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