Customer Reviews

Predictions: Society's Telltale Signature Reveals Past & Forcasts the Future

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"Predictions" by Theodore Modis is a physicist's look at broad technical, economic, and social trends over a long time span, as interpreted through the statistical techniques of Cesare Marchetti. He manages to tie togther diverse phenomona such as energy usage, artistic creativity, and traffic fatalities in a way that would have dawned on very few ordinary readers before reading this book. While I found it very interesting indeed, some of the generalizations being made should be taken with a grain of salt. The book is best if taken in broad outline without questioning every interpretation which Modis makes. Many readers might be put of by the math, but this is mostly light and explained in the form of prose rather than equations. I highly recommend reading it, although a healthly skepticm is in order.

Or, everything you ever wanted to know about the S-curve and why it all makes sense in the end. This book is about creativity, competition, and the natural order of things. Mutants are most important during times of violent change (the end of a paradigm) when they offer substantial variation from the non-workable past and hence improve the shift toward survival by being more fit for the new circumstances. Interestingly, each successive transport infrastructure (canals to rails to roads to airways) provides an order of magnitude improvement in productivity. One could consider the personal computer and modem a way station on this trend, with networking and true global collaborative work tools as the next node. In the life spiral of change 1996 is the center of a "charging" period with new order and new technology, and will lead to tension and grow in the 2000-2010 period followed by a discharge boom and then relaxation and recession in the 2010-2020 period. Pollution is the next "global war" that needs to be fought, and we will not have a global village until we can reduce the travel time between any two points anywhere to 70 minutes and a cumulative cost for a year of such travel to 15% of the average global income.