PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

6. A HARD FACT OF LIFE
During the last ten years I have seen many one-to-one substitutions
that were completed along S-curves but well below
the 100-percent level. 4 And thus evolved my understanding of
the competitive substitution process. I said earlier in this chapter
that tracing the S-curves for one-to-one substitutions is
easier and more reliable than the curves used earlier in this
book, because the ceiling is always 100 percent. I feel compelled
to qualify that statement. One should also search for the
ceiling while tracing S-curves for one-to-one substitutions. The
ceiling may be 100 percent, or close to it, but it may also be
well below that level. Searching for the ceiling makes life a little
more difficult, but it safeguards against embarrassing
predictions, such as that everyone will eventually die from
AIDS!
THE CULTURAL RESISTANCE TO INNOVATION
The rate of substitution between technologies is not only a consequence
of technological progress but also reflects society’s rate of acceptance
of the innovation in question. We will see in the next chapter that it took
more than one hundred years for sailing ships to replace steamships.
This time span is much longer than the lifetime of the ships themselves.
Sailing ships did not persist on the seas because they were made to last a
long time or because it was too costly to convert shipyards to outfit
boats with steam engines. There is a certain resistance to innovation,
which is controlled by cultural forces. Rational motivations such as
costs and investments play a secondary role.
The growth of the American railway network required not only huge
investments and construction efforts but also a battle against the strong
social opposition to the diffusion of a new technology, as expressed in a
poster shown in Figure 6.4.
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