PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

9. REACHING THE CEILING EVERYWHERE
FUTURONICS
The natural phenomena mentioned so far in this book can serve as forecasting
tools: invariants representing equilibrium positions, S-curves
describing competitive growth and substitutions, and the fifty-six-year
cycle clocking cyclical variations. Exploiting these notions, I am
tempted to look further into the future to paint part of the picture of our
children’s generation.
According to the Kondratieff cycle and as we are entering the
twenty-first century, the world is emerging from a general economic
recession that echoes—if with a smaller amplitude—the recession of the
1930s. Recessions are periods in which new innovations show up at an
increasing rate. Difficult times make people inventive. It was in the decade
of the 1930s that a host of important innovations were launched and
set the pace for a recovery that led to the high-growth period of the
1950s and the 1960s. To mention a few such innovations: television
(1936), Kodachrome (1935), synthetic rubber (1932), wrinkle-free fabrics
(1932), helicopters (1936), rockets (1935), automatic transmissions
(1939), power steering (1930), magnetic tape recording (1937), diesel
locomotives (1934), ballpoint pens (1938), radar (1934), plexiglass
(1935), fluorescent lighting (1934), and nylon perlon (1938). By analogy,
one can expect the 1990s to witness the birth of a multitude of
industry-generating innovations that will trigger a recovery leading to
another boom in the 2020s. Examples of well-positioned candidates for
such industries are: portable computers, cellular telephones, optical fibers,
optical disks, tomography, high-bandwidth communication
networks, all-invading intelligent microprocessors, the Internet, space
shuttle, maglevs, bio-sciences, gene technology, robotics, advanced materials
(such as ceramics and polymers), and high-temperature
superconductivity. Most of the fundamental discoveries that will lead to
new industries have already been made. We must now wait to see which
ones will lead to industrial successes before we pronounce them basic
innovations.
The years ahead of us constitute a period of growth leading to prosperity
not unlike what happened between 1940 and 1968. An era of
continuous improvement will succeed the era of entrepreneurship from
which we are just emerging. Opportunities should surface in a wide
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