PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

7. COMPETITION IS THE CREATOR AND THE REGULATOR
well before 1925 when his first movie appeared. When he finally started
his career as a film director at twenty-six, he produced prodigiously during
the first six years, as if he were trying to “catch up,” not unlike
others discussed in Chapter Four whose early careers display this sudden
release of pent-up productivity.
From 1930 onwards the cumulative number of Hitchcock’s fulllength
features grows smoothly to reach fifty-two by 1975, 96 percent
of his potential specified by the curve’s ceiling at fifty-four. Here is
another case in which little significant productive potential remained to
be realized at the time of death. The twist in Hitchcock’s case is that in
1955 he was persuaded to make television films for the celebrated
series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The open circles on the graph represent
the sum of both the full-length and the shorter television films. A
smaller S-curve can be clearly outlined on top of the large one. This
niche-within-a-niche contains twenty films; the process of filling it up
starts in 1955, and flattens out approaching natural completion by
1962.
The evolution of Hitchcock’s work just before he embarked on the
television adventure contains a suggestive signal, a slowing down leading
smoothly into the television activity that follows. Statistically
speaking, the small deviation of the data points around 1951 has no real
significance. It coincides, however, with the times when the film industry
in the United States felt most strongly the competition from the
growing popularity of television.
Growth in cycles results in the clustering phenomenon mentioned
earlier. The discovery of the stable chemical elements goes through cycles,
and so does Hitchcock’s work. Each cycle represents the filling up
of a new niche. Discovering one or two elements may seem a random
event at first, as Hitchcock’s first television film may have appeared.
Isolated events may be accidents or they may be the beginning of a new
wave. If something fundamentally new is involved, for example, a new
technology for separating elements or a new medium (television) for
film making, one can surmise that the isolated events are not accidents
but rather the opening up of a new niche. If this niche is to be filled naturally,
then the process will go through the successive stages of growth,
maturity, and decline. Consequently, more such events will follow, giving
rise to a cluster that becomes the life cycle of the process.
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