PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

7. COMPETITION IS THE CREATOR AND THE REGULATOR
other causes of death had a declining share from the beginning of the
century. Today cardiovascular ailments may claim twice as many victims
as cancer, but their share is steadily decreasing in favor of the
latter. Projections of the natural trajectories indicate that cancer and
cardiovascular diseases will split the total death toll fifty-fifty by the
year 2010.
It is likely that in the future new diseases will enter the scene. Some
time ago AIDS was thought to be a good candidate for a major new
cause of death comparable to cancer and cardiovascular ailments. I new
that AIDS was not a health menace of the same class, but in my picture I
created a scenario in which an aggressively epidemic new disease labeled
“AIDS” enters the scene with 1 percent market share toward the
end of the twentieth century and grows toward filling the whole niche. I
imposed on the growth of this newcomer a slope comparable to those of
cancer and cardiovascular ailments. The growing new competitor caused
the share of cancer to saturate, go over a peak during the second half of
the twenty-first century, and enter decline by the twenty-second century,
as “AIDS” attained today’s levels of cancer.
The above projection for the evolution of “AIDS” makes this threat
much more important than the real AIDS which is confined to a microniche
of 2.3 percent of all deaths, as we saw in Chapter Five. A new
disease will have to be more virulent than AIDS in order to achieve the
diffusion in society sketched in the figure. The unavoidable assumption
that it will grow at a rate comparable to that of the other two major ailments
significantly delays its impact. Therefore, barring the appearance
of yet unknown new such diseases, the best forecast is that the share of
cancer will continue to grow unhindered.
Ten Years Later
The little circles in Appendix C, Figure 7.2 generally confirm
the predictions made in 1988. The sudden upturn of
“Other” makes more noise than harm because of the logarithmic
scale; the real increase is of the order of only 1 percent,
and is indicative of fluctuations around very large and small
market shares (see Chapter 10). The relative gains of cardio-
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