Is "Future Shock" now a thing of the past?

Great Debates
1

Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book Future Shock is about the stress and disorientation people suffered from the the rapid transformation of their world from “industrial society” to “super-industrial society.”

If that was a real psychological factor in human affairs in 1970, it may be so no longer, because:

  1. The process of ever-accelerating social and technological change has been going on for so long, now, that people have had time to get used to it. E.g., you don’t have to be all that old, now, to remember clearly a time when almost no one had heard of the Internet or seriously discussed the idea of gay marriage, and the Cold War was expected to last forever if we were lucky; and your parents lived through similarly drastic, epochal changes (though your grandparents did not); so, everybody subconsciously expects things to change at similar pace for the rest of their lives.

  2. In terms of historic paradigm-shattering changes, the process actually seems to be slowing down. The Singularity is an ever-receding horizon. See this article, “The Boring Age.”

2

This part of the article made it hard to believe

I don’t buy that. In 2008 about $250 billion was invested in new energy globally, and about $140 billion of that was in renewables. Wind and solar are starting to grow at drastic rates, and are not going to be negligible much longer, they will likely be 20% or more of global energy by the 2020s at current rates. China alone is expected to install about 20GW of wind energy in 2012 alone, giving them 50GW by then.

His other points about how the truly life altering technologies have already been invented are in some ways true. But that is because you can’t reinvent refrigeration, indoor plumbing or electricity. Once you have a groundbreaking technology, you can’t reinvent it. And the list of major problems and major human needs are fairly limited. Once you have an elevator you can build skyscrapers above 10 stories. Thats it. Problem solved. Same with indoor plumbing. Once you have that you cut disease and allow for larger cities. There is nothing more to do. I don’t think that means we aren’t innovative anymore, it means the big problems have been solved adequately and don’t need any more improvement.

However in the last few decades we have seen an explosion of

air conditioning
mobile phones and smart phones
internet access

all of which are life altering. I believe air conditioning made setting areas of the southwest bearable. That is a life altering technology, but once you develop it that it is. And like I said the list of major human needs (adequate temperature, food storage, transportation, protection from microbe infections, etc) are limited.

It seems the biggest, life altering technologies are occurring in developing nations. Solar stoves, mobile phones, affordable laptops, medications for microbial infections, etc.

3

I disagree. I think there will be a much greater return on investment in figuring out new ways to squeeze oil and gas out of the ground for a long, long time to come. Sure, solar and wind power will be useful supplements and offer niche applications, but we’re still gonna be relying on fossil fuels. No matter how often you put flowers in your hair and sing kumbaya around the campfire, at the end of the day it’ll be a business decision pivoting on ROI.

Furthermore, I predict:

  • The Human Genome Project and its successors will continue to yield interesting information and tweaks (we now know the exact combination of genes that causes your left eye to twitch in the morning!) but no real cures.

  • Manned space flight will continue to be an ever-more-unglamorous low-orbit chore; interplanetary manned space flight a pipe dream. A very, very few rich people will ride space planes for the novelty, but most people will still travel in jetliners and cars.

  • In the year 2050, the Air Force’s mainstay bombers will be its fleet of B-52s. Not the B-52 “product line,” mind you, but the actual planes it is operating now.

We live in an extended age of niche applications, tweaking and fiddling around with marginal improvements at the edges.

4

Personally, I believe that the only viable primary (not supplementary) alternative fuel is fusion power, so unless we have a breakthrough in that field, we’ll still be using fossil fuels 40 years from now.

5

Trying to predict the future is pointless. People who should have the best results do slightly worse than guesswork. The rets of us do much worse than guesswork.

The problem is that a single, seemingly insignificant niche invention can have massive effects 50 years down the track. “The internet” was insignificant 30 years ago and unheard of 50 years ago. Now it is literally changing the world. The same can be said for the internal combustion engine or hormonal birth control or any other major invention that genuinely changed the world.

The example I usually bring up in these threads is 3D printing technology. 10 years ago nobody but researchers new about it. 5 years ago a few of the bigger engineering firms had the technology. No wit’s within reach of private individuals who want one. As the technology advances over the next 50 years it could have the most profound influence on society, bringing us close to a true post-scarcity state. Or maybe it won’t. Maybe, like spaceflight or atomic power or virtual reality, it will be a dead end, becoming safer and cheaper and more widespread but never diversifying much beyond it’s starting point and never used by 99% of the populace.

Which is the real point. We can’t predict the future because any seemingly small change totally changes all the rules. A free energy source may have been discovered 10 years ago, and is just awaiting perfection. They might discover a mechanism to extend the human lifespan to 200 healthy years tomorrow. they might produce a robot that can truly replace humans in every endeavour. None of those things are in any way impossible, and any one of them would likely result in changes far more profound than anything we have seen before.

I’m also not sure that I buy the concept that we aren’t making big changes any longer. The electronics revolution, for example, happened in my lifetime (barely) produced changes every bit as profound as the industrial revolution, insofar as it largely killed unskilled jobs. Suddenly you needed at least a HS education to be able to function even as a factory labourer. Globalisation is having similarly huge effects insofar as the developed world is losing anything like unskilled jobs, not to mention the effects on on attitudes towards foreign affairs. We don’t notice these changes as being historically significant, though most of us know the impact they have on us personally or in our immediate communities. But the same was true of people living through all the big changes of the past. Very few people knew that the industrial revolution was big until it was pretty much over.

The same goes for strictly technological changes. The internet is as big a change as the invention of the telegram or the printing press. It’s effect on human communications is huge, and it has only really been around for 15 years. Looking solely at P2P file sharing and Wikipedia we see two examples of where the internet has totally changed the way that most people do things. These are revolutionary changes, and they have along way to go yet before they peak. If we compare that to the effect that the printing press or telegraph had 15 years after public adoption the effect is more than comparable.

Which I think is the real problem. We can’t judge the significance of change while it is occurring, and so we can’t judge the effect of recent changes. In 1850 people would have sid that recent changes are fairly minor, while saying that things sure had changed since Grandad’s day, yet now we would say that there were greater changes taking place in 1850 than ever before or since.

To really try to judge the pace of current change we need to look whether people lives have changed. And you better believe they have. Go and look at the thread on Generation X over I MPSIMS to see what I mean. We have people of age 40 reminiscing over how completely different the lives of young people are today. 40 year olds, not greybeards but people who haven;t even entered middle age. That’s how fast things are changing. The rate of change hasn’t slowed down in recent years, the lifestyle gap between 40 yos and 20 yos is at least as large as it was 20 years ago, and IMO much higher.

So as far as i can tell the “paradigm shattering” changes are occurring as fast as they ever have.

6

Fission isn’t viable? :dubious:

7

Didn’t you just call it a dead end?

8

The article got a bit weird when it started talking about politics.
And this bit:

Doesn’t make sense. I might as well say that Luxembourg or Qatar is the dominant global economic power, even if the USA has a larger GDP because of its larger population.

9

Nobody has even mentioned fission power in this thread. :confused:

I guess the point is that the GDP will be higher, but most of that will be going into sustaining the local population, and so there’s a lack economic flexibility. Combine that with an unstable/unpredictable regime and you can end up with a country that’s producing a lot of stuff, but the people are still much poorer than in the US and the economy itself is less reliable, and hence attracts less investment. A somewhat smaller economy with a high standard of living, stable investment markets etc will have a lot more economic clout because there is more money available for investment, greater tolerance for boycotts etc.

To give a real world example, Spain has a much larger economy, in terms of GDP, than Canada. But it’s not hard to argue that Canada is more economically powerful. If each of those countries threatened to flex their economic muscle, who would you be most scared of?

10

We must be really bad guessers, to make guesses which are even worse than guesswork. :slight_smile:

11

The trouble is people don’t guess. They try to use a technique, usually heavily based on extrapolation, which is why we do worse than guessing.

If someone in 1965 had simply *guessed *the effect that population growth would have on wealth, for example, they could guess that it would cause wealth to increase, decrease or remain static, IOW by guessing they would have had have a 33% chance of being right. Instead people in 1965 looked at the current trends and then extrapolated. So 90% of people predicted that population growth would see a decrease in wealth, and consequently 90% of people were dead wrong. Had they imply guessed then only 33% of them would have been dead wrong and another 33% mostly wrong.

The same goes for flying cars, nuclear wars, moon bases, virtual reality, shortage of oil and all the other nonsense that people predicted. Had they simply *guessed *they would have done much better than trying to make predictions based on extrapolation. Or indeed based on any other method.

12

:confused: X 10^:confused:

13

Ahh, I see the confusion. you didn’t bother to look at the context.

I said quite specifically that atomic power is a dead end. It did become, and continues to become, safer and cheaper and more widespread but it never diversified much beyond it’s starting point. 60 years ago it was being used for bombs and large scale reactors, and today it is still only used for bombs and large scale reactors. 99% of the populace do not have any use for atomic power in their daily lives. The nuclear cars and basement reactors of the 50s and 60s never happened.

If you read the whole paragraph it’s quite clear that it is a dead end technology insofar as it never advanced from where it started, unlike, say, the transistor or the internal combustion engine which have diversified to the point that we use them in several different contexts several times every single day.

I even explicitly stated that it atomic power will become safer and cheaper and more widespread.

The only way I can see anyone to interpret that as meaning that it won’t become increasingly used is if they didn’t actually read the context at all, just read 5 words. :confused:

14

You “mentioned” it, nonetheless. And you brought it up because you were trying to rebut Alessan’s assertion that the only true power breakthrough would be fusion. As far as I can see, your elaboration just now only supports his point.

15

Nonsense, or just before their time? That’s another problem with making predictions. Flying cars probably won’t ever be practical. But a nuclear war is likely inevitable eventually, and the oil will run out at some point. And virtual reality and space travel strike me me as technologies before their time. Our virtual reality technology is still crude and expensive, and not only is the same true of space travel but it doesn’t have the supporting technologies to make it more practical. It’s just as easy to screw up your prediction by being off by 50 years in one direction or another than by just being flat wrong.

Personally, I don’t buy the idea that we’ve reached the “boring age”; there’s too many potential revolutionary technologies and too many potential problems or outright disasters. For example if the worse case predictions of global warming take place, and we start seeing much of the coastal regions submerged and widespread famine, then “boring” is not how I would describe the resulting mess. Or if something like drastic human life extension or regeneration is developed; the biological sciences in general are likely to bring major changes because they apply directly to us.

16

Yes, because when I state repeatedly and explicitly that it’s use will continue to increase in the future, that clearly supports a claim that that it will not be viable to use at all in the future.
:confused:

17

But let’s get back to the OP.

It’s it BRUTALLY obvious Toffler was wrong about the concept of “future shock”? I don’t see people in psychological distress over recent technological changes, do you guys?

18

What “ever-accelerating” social and technological change?

19

It means that the pace at which new advancements and technologies are discovered or invented is increasing. The implication is that the more advanced we become, the better we are able to channel our knowledge into becoming even more advanced.

For example, think how long it takes to design and prototype a complex part by hand using a drafting board, a calculator and traditional fabrication techniques vs designing the same part using modern CAD/CAM software and one of those 3D printer jammies. You can blast out variations in a few hours or minutes in what used to take weeks.

Or if you have ever had to write a high school paper using a traditional typewriter.

Well, maybe this guy.

Seriously though, it’s not just distress over “technological changes”. It isn’t your grandpa shaking his fist at the microwave oven or your mom using the CD ROM drive as a cup holder. What I believe the OP is describing is a sort of “culture shock” resulting from the world changing faster than they adapt to it. Sort of like moving to a foreign country where you don’t quite get the culture.

And yes, I do see it. I see it in people who feel compelled to check their Blackberry every two seconds, in jobless people who can’t figure out why their entire industry has just evaporated or in people who are miserable because they are constantly e-dating on Match.com (or whatever people use) but can’t seem to find someone special to settle down with.

Twenty years ago, people didn’t have a “quarter life crisis” at 22 years old. It was just sort of accepted that you graduate college, start your career and then start settling down. Now all of a sudden that process is taking a lot longer and people are having a much harder time adjusting. Most likely IMHO because that sort of traditional life plan is becomming less and less relevant.

Why are sites like Facebook so popular and why do people connect to high school classmates they haven’t seen in 15 years and may not even been that close with in the first place? Because in a highly mobile, highly dynamic environment where people drift in and out of each others lives and jobs change every 20 months, people like to feel grounding in having a connection to people or places.

Basically, I what I’m saying is that I think 90% of the stress and depression people suffer these days is a result of all the fear and uncertainty that comes with being unable to plan or prepare for the future because it is constantly changing, even if they don’t realize it.

20

They didnt have no aeroplanes,
didnt have no streamlined trains,
but they had lonely country lanes
When Pa was courtin’ Ma!