PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

6. A HARD FACT OF LIFE
replacement. The effectiveness of face-to-face dealings is recognized
among businesspersons today as much as it was among the emissaries
of antiquity.
Serious doubts are raised as to whether technological means will ever
satisfy the social need for communicating through personal contact. It is
difficult to compare quantitatively the amount of information exchanged
through personal contacts to that exchanged through technological
means. The information content of body language, for example, cannot
easily be measured in units, like phone calls or pieces of mail. But the
insistence with which executives and politicians cling to their costly
missions suggests that such a substitution may after all be “unnatural”
or, at best, a slow one, much slower than the telephone-for-letter substitution.
Another reason for which an a priori reasonable substitution may not
display the expected trajectory is that the variable is not properly defined.
The example of detergent substituting for soap mentioned earlier
would not have followed a straight line had Fisher and Pry taken all
soap. They carefully considered laundry soap only, leaving cosmetic
soap aside. Complications can also arise in substitutions that look “unnatural”
in cases of a niche-within-a-niche, or a niche-beyond-a-niche.
In both cases two different S-curves must be considered for the appropriate
time periods. In the straight-line representation such cases show a
broken line made out of two straight sections.
When close scrutiny does not eliminate irregularities, it means that
there is something unnatural after all. A substitution may show local
deviations from a straight-line pattern, which can be due to exceptional
temporary phenomena. But such anomalies are soon reabsorbed, and the
process regains a more natural course. As an example of this, Fisher and
Pry point out the replacement of natural by synthetic rubber during the
war years. In the 1930s synthetic rubber was slowly making an appearance
in the American market as an inferior alternative to natural rubber,
which was imported in large quantities from foreign sources. During the
early stages of World War II, imports of natural rubber were largely cut
off and, at the same time demand for rubber increased considerably. A
large national effort during these years resulted in improving the quality
and reducing the production costs of synthetic rubber.
137