PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

EPILOGUE
Fads and media stories about certain issues rise and subside, and in
so doing produce waves of interest. These waves reflect the public’s
preoccupation, but at the same time they stimulate it, thus mixing cause
and effect. The feedback loop does not deteriorate into a vicious circle
that goes on forever, however. Fads and preoccupations have a certain
potential to exhaust and a life cycle to go through. Each wave of interest
replicates a natural-growth process.
Once growth is complete, the level reached reflects an equilibrium.
Its signature becomes an invariant or constant that, despite erratic
fluctuations, manifests the existence of tolerance thresholds and social
balance. To find these constants one may have to look beyond the sensational
headlines, which sometimes mask the essential message. Social
living is self-regulated and may ultimately defy legislation and public
opinion.
Finally, there is “tool” of the overall cycle that clocks people’s
whims and adventures with a period of about fifty-six years. Like a
slow underlying pulsation, it rocks society regularly, sending it through
waves of violence and destruction, achievement and progress, prosperity
and economic depression. All these “tools” can be used
quantitatively as means to improve forecasts and decrease the chance
of mistakes. Through use of historical data they can help reveal the
direction of a course and the extent of its boundaries. One can even
estimate the size of the deviations expected above and below the projected
path.
But perhaps they can be of even greater help in a qualitative way,
without the use of computers, fitting programs, and mathematical calculations.
When these tools are grasped more than just intellectually, they
give rise to a better understanding of the most probable evolution of a
process and how much of it still lies ahead. Such understanding goes
well beyond the supertanker analogy, which claims that supertankers
cannot make sharp turns, and therefore their immediate course is predictable.
The life cycle of natural growth is symmetric, so that there is
as much to be expected from the time the maximum rate of growth is
reached to the end of the cycle as was obtained from the beginning of
the cycle to the time of the maximum rate of growth. From half of a
growth process one can intuitively predict the other half.
Invariably there is change, some of it imposed, some of it provoked.
For one reason or another, transitions always take place. Change may be
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