PROLOGUE
Twenty Years Later
When Real Life Misbehaves
1. THE S-CURVE
The Law of Natural Growth
Fatal Car Accidents
Invariants
Deviations
2. LIMITS TO GROWTH
GDP Growth Is Capped
Inflation
GDP Growth in Other Parts of the World
Discussion
The Coming of Age of the United States
3. SUBSTITUTIONS
One-to-One Substitutions
Successive Substitutions
Diseases
Means of Transportation
Nobel Prize Awards
Fishing and Prying
4. WHERE HAS THE ENERGY PICTURE GONE WRONG?
US Crude oil
The Wordl Energy Picture
When Will Hydrogen Come?
The Price of Primary Energy
World Energy Needs
In Closing
5. DEVIATIONS FROM NATURAL GROWTH
From S-Curves to chaos
Energy Consumption
The Concord
Insights into Fluctuations
S-Curves with Variable Ceiling
6. THE KONDRATIEFF CYCLE
Atlantic Tropical Hurricanes
Sunspots
Earth's Temperature
Seasons of Growth
7. CASCADES OF S CURVES
Just-in-Time Replacement
Fractals of S-Curves
The MicroVAX Family of DEC Minicomputers
Microsoft Windows Operating Systems
When Do We Stop Being Children?
In Closing
8. GENETIC REENGINEERING OF CORPORATIONS
More than One Species in the Same Niche
Attacker's Advantage, Defender's Counterattack
Competition Management
Finding the Magic Advertising Message
Nobel Laureates
Who Is Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?
9. THE PRIMORDIAL CURVE AND THE SINGULARITY
The Primordial S-Curve
The Singularity Myth
There Are No Exponentials. There Are only S-Curves
US Oil Production
Moore's Law
World Population
There Is alreay some Evidence for Saturation
The US GDP
The End of the Internet Rush
Society Auto-regulates Itself
Fatal Car Accidents
The AIDS Niche
Nuclear Energy
World Population - The Big Picture
More than just Cerebral Intelligence
The Human Species Is not Threatened
The Bitcoin
In Closing
Playing the Devil's Advocate
EPILOGUE
APPENDIX A. OTHER UPDATES FOR PREDICTIONS
APPENDIX B. MATHEMATICAL FORMULATION OF S-CURVES AND THE PROCEDURE FOR FITTING THEM ON DATA
The Malthusian Case: One Species Only
The Volterra-Lotka Equations: Two Competitors in a Niche
Logistic vs. Chaos Equations
Fitting an S-curve on a Set of Data Points
Fitting an S-curve with a Variable Ceiling
APPENDIX C. EXPECTED UNCERTAINTIES ON S-CURVE FORECASTS
NOTES AND SOURCES
APPENDIX D. DISTINGUISHING A LOGISTIC FROM AN
EXPONENTIAL
APPENDIX E. THE CANONICAL MILESTONES
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