PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

9. REACHING THE CEILING EVERYWHERE
American society: “Cars ... may become small trucks carrying voluminous
adult toys around the countryside.”
The day when cars start declining in numbers is still far in the future.
For the time being car populations are stopping to grow in most of the
Western world, provoking a saturation in the automobile industry. Similar
and simultaneous saturations in many other industries give rise to an
economic recession. But the cyclical phenomena seen in Chapter Eight
assure us of a timely change—in particular, of a new cluster of innovations
that flourished in the 1990s, giving rise to new industries.
Moreover, a few of the old industries have not yet reached saturation
levels; for example, electronics and computers, natural gas pipelines,
nuclear energy power stations, and subway transportation infrastructures.
Finally, two growth processes that are still rather young and can
be expected to act as the workhorses of the economic development during
the next two decades are air route connections and pollution
abatement. On a global scale there are many parts of the world where
the growth of the old industries is not yet completed; a case in point is
road construction in the ex-Soviet Union. Taken together, all of these
factors point to a few decades of steadily increasing economic growth in
the early twenty-first century.
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