PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

10. IF I CAN, I WANT
The state depicted at the bottom graph is one of only approximate
chaos because the erratic behavior is diminishing with time; the fluctuations
will die out sooner or later. Also, our description is reversible;
from late patterns one can in principle recover early ones, which would
have been impossible with true chaos. Still, there is an advantage in our
method because we observe erratic behavior that precedes as well as
follows the main growth period. Our approach provides a model for all
the instabilities connected to a growth process.
The two cases mentioned above—annual car registrations in Japan
and coal production in the U.S.—are examples where growth alternates
with order. A more typical example can be found in the graph depicting
per-capita annual energy consumption worldwide that is presented in an
article by J. Ausubel, A. Grubler and N. Nakicenovic (Appendix C, Figure
10.2). The graph shows a niche-filling process from 1850 to 1910,
followed by a chaotic state from 1910 to 1945, a second niche filling
from 1940 to 1970, and a second chaotic state starting in 1970 and projected
into the twenty-first century. The authors, sufficiently aware of
this alternation, continue to predict the end of the second chaotic state,
the opening of a third niche, and a third chaotic state occurring during
the second half of the twenty-first century.
Ten Years Later
The little circles in Appendix C Figures 10.2 prove the authors’
prediction to be right. During the last fourteen years percapita
energy consumption worldwide indeed remained flat, a
situation likely to change soon if we take example from the
per-capita energy consumption in the U.S. depicted in Appendix
C Figure 8.1.
The chapter on linking order to chaos is far from being closed. More
investigation is needed both in case studies and in theory. The evidence
presented here suggests that conditions of natural growth alternate with
states of erratic fluctuations. A well-established S-curve will point to
the time when chaotic oscillations can be expected—when the ceiling
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