PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

6. A HARD FACT OF LIFE
theory of relativity; it took decades for physicists to accept it. Another is
the slowness with which Americans give up smoking.
UNNATURAL SUBSTITUTIONS
Commonsense arguments may suggest that a forthcoming substitution
should proceed naturally. One can then reasonably expect the percentage
shares of the competing entities to behave accordingly. For
example, communications that were predominately exchanged through
letter writing for centuries could be expected to be replaced by telegrams
and/or telephone calls as these means became available early in
the twentieth century. The speed and the convenience of the new means
of communication demonstrated clear competitive advantages. This
turned out to be the case for telephone calls but not for telegrams.
Arnulf Grubler demonstrated that substitution of telephone calls for
letters in France since the turn of the twentieth century proceeded along
straight lines (Appendix C, Figure 6.5). The data he graphed were the
percentage of all messages exchanged by telephone or letter during one
year. Despite fluctuations, some of them understandably due to the war
(people wrote letters during the war but rushed to telephones as soon as
the war was over), the overall trend seems to indicate a natural process
of substitution, starting sometime before the beginning of twentieth century
and reaching 70 percent by 1980. Telegrams, and later telexes,
were not considered because they never gained more than a fraction of a
percent of the total messages market, Grubler said. He did not look at
facsimile and e-mail transmissions for lack of data, but it is safe to say
that the major steps in the evolution of communications have been letter,
telephone, and e-mail.
What resisted substitution the most was face-to-face contact in communications.
When the telephone was introduced, people hoped it
would replace some of the necessity for travel. Recently more sophisticated
means of electronic communication have become available—
teleconferences and image telephones—that could also be expected to
replace business trips, particularly during times of cost controls. Such
technology has undoubtedly eliminated a certain amount of legwork.
However, the need for personal contact seems to stubbornly resist
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