PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

3. INANIMATE PRODUCTION LIKE ANIMATE REPRODUCTION
been micro-niches of different usages coming in and out of fashion all
along: art, dentistry, electronics, the space industry, and others. Materials
that can substitute for gold—sometimes better suited for a particular
use—are continuously invented. It is not clear that the need for gold will
continue to increase indefinitely.
If the production of gold and oil proceed so as to strike a continuous
balance between supply and demand, it must follow a natural path. Evidence
that a path is natural is its similarity to an S-curve, which would
indicate that the rate of growth is proportional to the part of a niche still
remaining unfilled. Production of gold and oil is indeed found to behave
like this.
I studied the world production of gold by plotting the cumulative
amount of the metal extracted since 1850. 6 This date can be thought of
as the beginning of contemporary gold mining, since the prior annual
rate of world production was more than a factor of ten smaller. However,
a different scale natural-growth curve would probably be suitable
to describe gold production from antiquity to 1850.
I found the data points on the graph to accurately outline the first 45
percent of an S-curve. The projected ceiling of gold production is approached
toward the end of the twenty-second century. Even if gold is
no longer being found in America, the world production will keep increasing
on the average to reach the maximum rate of annual extraction
around 2025, which will thus become a kind of golden era.
The case of oil is somewhat different. Oil started being produced
commercially in 1859, but production picked up significantly only in the
early twentieth century. From the beginning, extraction of oil stimulated
exploration for new reserves. Exploration being expensive, however, it
was pursued only to the extent deemed necessary at the time. Figure 3.2
shows both production and discovery of reserves for the United States.
The historical data (depicted by thick lines) represent cumulative production
and cumulative discovery of reserves. 7 Oil production is a
smoother process than discovery, which features bigger fluctuations due
to the inherent randomness associated with a search. Both sets of data
permit excellent fits to S-curves (depicted by thin lines).
The two curves turned out to be remarkably parallel, with a constant
separation of ten years. Such a rigid linkage between production and
discovery, witnessed for ninety years, is proof of an underlying regulatory
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