PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

PREFACE
rarely demonstrated. Scientifically minded forecasters try to make their
approach credible via an exercise, which consists of ignoring some of
the recent data while making their prediction and then using these data
to verify the prediction. But this practice fails to convince astute minds.
Skeptics doubt the effectiveness of forgetting having seen the final outcome.
The only really valid test for a prediction is the test of time. You
make your prediction and then you wait the time necessary for the truth
to come out. Track record cannot be disputed.
The predictions made in this book enjoy the test of time. An older
version of the book was published in 1992 by Simon & Schuster under
the title Predictions - Society’s Telltale Signature Reveals the Past and
Forecasts the Future. In today’s edition those predictions are confronted
with recent data. In every chapter new sections have been
introduced under the heading Ten Years Later reviewing what happened
during the last ten years and comparing it to the original predictions.
There are many success stories, where prediction and reality have gone
hand in hand. But there are also some intricate disagreements.
The success stories reinforce our confidence in the original forecasts
and the method used. The disagreements are useful in a different way.
Predictions that came out wrong are not necessarily failures. It is the
reader’s prerogative to interpret them simply as unsuccessful forecasts
and appropriately distrust further projections of the trends in question.
But I have found it rewarding to dig deeper into the reasons that may
cause deviations from directions dictated by fundamental natural laws.
In many cases the insights obtained this way teach us more than accurate
forecasts would have.
Among the new material that has been added in this edition are discussions
on some issues that have become topical only recently, such as the
coming of hydrogen (Chapter Seven) and the war on terrorism (Chapter
Nine). I am not doing this to become fashionable. The new material either
answers questions previously raised, or constitutes a natural evolution of
the trends all ready established.
Theodore Modis
April 2002
12