PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

PROLOGUE
looking at the whole market would reveal the detailed competition between
the various models. Could this approach describe the substitution
of computers as well as it described the many substitutions Marchetti
spoke of? Could it be that replacing big computers by smaller ones is a
“natural” process which can be quantified and projected far into the future?
Would that be a means of forecasting the future of my company?
Could the life cycles of organizations be predicted like those of organisms,
and if so, with what accuracy? Would it even be possible to derive
an equation for myself and estimate the time of my death?
Beyond my excitement, there was some suspicion. I did not know
how much I could trust Marchetti. I had to check things out for myself.
If there were a catch, it should become obvious sooner or later. The one
thing I did trust, even if I was no longer in physics, was the scientific
method.
In a few months most of my friends and acquaintances knew of my
preoccupation with using Volterra’s formulations and Marchetti’s approach
as a means of probing the future. Contrary to my experience as a
particle physicist, interest in my work now was genuine. It was no
longer the befuddlement of those who believe themselves intellectually
inferior and admire the interest that must be there in something too difficult
to understand. Now, it was more like “This is really interesting!
Can I make it work for me? “
Everyone who knew of my work was intrigued with the possibility
that forecasts could become more reliable through the use of natural
sciences. Requests for more information, explanations, and specific applications
kept pouring in from all directions. A friend who had just
begun selling small sailboats wanted to know next summer’s demand on
Lake Geneva. Another, in the restaurant business, worried about his diminishing
clientele and was concerned that his cuisine was too
specialized and expensive compared to his competition. A depressed
young woman was anxious to know when her next love affair would be,
and a doctor who had had nine kidney stones in fifteen years wanted to
know if and when there would be an end to this painful procession.
Besides those eager to believe in the discovery of a miraculous future-predicting
apparatus, there were also the skeptics. They included
those who mistrusted successful forecasts as carefully chosen successes
among many failures; those who argued that if there was a method for
foretelling the future, one would not talk about it, but get rich on it in-
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