PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

11. FORECASTING DESTINY
least four different occasions during this period. There is an internal
regulatory mechanism in the evolution of technology that points to a
deep-seated and stable organization, just as with the energy system. In
fact, technology and energy can be thought of as subsystems of the
greater human system.
Being 100 percent efficient is a God-like quality. In that respect humans
still have a long way to go. In spite of the specific gains in
efficiency over the last three centuries, if we take all energy uses together
in the developed countries, we find that the overall efficiency for
energy use today is about 5 percent. It means that to produce a certain
amount of useful work we must consume twenty times this amount in
energy. This result makes humans look better than computers but still
shamefully wasteful, and raises worries in view of the magnitude of the
useful work achieved daily.
To appreciate this more the following question: How much have
Americans increased their per-capita energy consumption in the last one
hundred years? The answer of well-informed people in general is between
a factor of ten and a factor of fifty. The real case is only a factor
of two! How can that be? Because, in the meantime, all processes involved
in obtaining useful work have improved their efficiency.
Today’s average efficiency of 5 percent may well be five times higher
than that of one hundred years ago, and compensates for the increase in
demand for primary energy.
Increasing efficiency is probably underestimated when dealing with
energy problems. The total primary energy consumption in the United
States is expected to increase by a factor of two to two and a half between
now and the mid-twenty-first century. Useful energy, however,
will most likely jump by a factor of twenty, considering that we are only
at the beginning of the efficiency growth process, which still follows
exponential patterns.
Energy planners should take into account the regular and forecastable
evolution of our efficiency. In producing their models, they would
be making a mistake if they underestimated the built-in wisdom of the
system. The world primary-energy substitution picture shown earlier in
Figure 7.6 suggests that a “natural” phaseout of the old primary energy
sources and a phasing in of nuclear energy, with a possible new source
around the year 2020, could provide a smooth transition to the twenty-
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