PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

5
Good Guys and Bad Guys Compete the
Same Way
Good and bad are often used to exemplify opposition, not unlike night
and day. It is ironic, however, that good and bad are largely subjective
notions and something can easily be good and bad at the same time for
different people.
Emptying one niche can be seen as filling another one; it is a matter
of definition. The number of needles found in a haystack grows with
time, but the number of needles remaining to be found declines in a
complementary way. In the case of an artist’s productivity, the curve
that tells how fast his or her output is growing is directly related to the
one that describes the rate of exhausting original ideas. The former
grows toward a maximum value, while the latter declines toward zero.
At all times the sum of the two curves equals a constant, the total number,
be it of needles in a haystack or of creations in a lifetime.
For a young child, growing up is always seen as a good thing even
though it can be translated to a reduction of the number of days remaining
to be lived. Creating a piece of art is never thought of as “one less”
among the works remaining to be created. Creating at a reduced rate, on
the other hand, carries the mark of deterioration. If I had to give a
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