PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

10. IF I CAN, I WANT
The search for new impressions is the active agent behind tourism
but also behind movie-going and visits to museums and expositions.
The nourishment from having an experience for the first time generates
pleasure. Most of the pleasure from photographs, for example, comes
when one first looks at them or years later when all is forgotten and it
feels as if one is looking at them for the first time. It is new impressions
for which people travel, sometimes to improve their health on their doctor’s
recommendation. Wise schools of thought, often from Eastern
cultures, teach techniques for looking at familiar things in “new” ways.
In both instances, the only beneficiary of the new impressions is the individual
onlooker.
In explorations, however, like that of Columbus, the new impressions
were not only for the benefit of the explorer. The whole known
world was watching him. (This, by the way, was literally the case when
Niel A. Armstrong stepped onto the moon for the first time and the
whole world shared some of his first impressions through television.)
The whole world benefited from Columbus’s explorations through
learning about a new world. But when the ten-millionth tourist visits
Notre Dame in Paris, it is strictly the individual who will benefit from
new impressions, and through his camera the world cannot learn anything
new. Such an individual is a tourist, while Columbus, an explorer,
acted according to a destiny, the learning process through which Europe
discovered the New World.
FROM TOURISM TO S-CURVES
Tourism can sport a sophisticated disguise. I knew a gifted pianist who
would play Bach pieces I had never heard before. To my surprise, several
of these pieces turned out to be not only compositions of his own
but on-the-spot improvisations. He had studied Bach extensively and
was able to imitate his music perfectly. Similarly, there are painters
who can make excellent reproductions of great masterpieces. Such
works have low value but not necessarily because they are artistically
inferior to the originals, as the experts invariably claim. They simply
are not the originals. Beethoven did not become great just because his
music was good. Besides being good, his music was also different from
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