PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

11. FORECASTING DESTINY
announced improvement had been long overdue. The following
week the new machines were installed and for several days
employees made jokes about mechanical intelligence and
technological comforts.
It was several weeks later that I found myself in front of the
machine without enough change for my mid-morning coffee. I
looked in my desk drawers for any odd change—in earlier
times there would have been “emergency” coins lying
around—but with our new machines, there was no longer any
reason to hoard change. My colleagues were in a meeting, and
I did not feel like interrupting them with my petty problem. I
walked over to the secretary’s desk; she was not there. Instinctively,
I looked in the box where she used to keep piles of
change for coffee; it was empty.
I ran out of the building to make change at a nearby restaurant,
wondering why those coffee machines couldn’t accept
paper bills. Then I realized that the old machine had not been
so inconvenient after all. It had been a nuisance to have to plan
for a supply of correct change, but since that was the reality,
we all made provisions for it in some way or another. It took
some forethought, but one could not really say it was a stressful
situation (being deprived of a cup of coffee never killed
anybody.) With the installation of the new machines, however,
we relaxed more. Perhaps I had relaxed a little too much. I decided
to make sure that in the future there is always some
change in my desk so as to avoid situations like this.
At the same time I felt there was a certain quota of inconvenience
associated with getting a cup of coffee. If the
amount of inconvenience rose above the tolerance threshold,
actions were taken to improve the situation. On the other
hand, if obtaining a cup of coffee became technically too
easy, we would relax more and more until problems crept in
to create the “necessary” amount of inconvenience. Imagine a
situation where coffee is free and continuously available. A
busy person, trying to be efficient and exploit the fact that
there is no longer reason to “worry” about coffee, may simply
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