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

[RickJay]

@msmith537

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.

What you’re describing isn’t really what Toffler was predicting. Toffler wasn’t saying things would change; his claim was that changes would literally cause psychological breakdowns in people. Not just the odd crazy person, but a LOT of people.

And in any case what’s new here? People being miserable because they can’t find the right person to marry is about as new as DNA. That has zip to do with dating sites. People being out of sorts when losing jobs is also old news - I mean, shit, how do you think people felt when the steel industry went to hell? You’ve never heard of “Roger & Me”? That’s an entire documentary about the phenomenon you’re describing and it was released in 1989, at which time very few people had even heard of the Internet.

As for “quarter life crises” kids have always been whiny. None of this strikes me as being the result of technology. If anything, I think it’s surprising how well people have positively incorporated new technology into their lives. Society hums along as well as it ever did, if not better. I see no evidence technology’s causing a mass psychological crisis.

I’m not laying into Alvin Toffler here; he was wrong, but people trying to predict the future beyond “the sun will probably continue to rist in the East” are usually wrong.

[BrainGlutton]

@Blake

The nuclear cars and basement reactors of the 50s and 60s never happened.

Ford did invent a nuclear car, powered by an on-board nuclear reactor, but it was never mass-marketed.

That’s for greenwimps, anyway. I want a four-wheeled version of the Project Orion spaceship! Hurled down the highway by nuclear explosions! YEEE-HAAAWWW!

[msmith537]

@RickJay

What you’re describing isn’t really what Toffler was predicting. Toffler wasn’t saying things would change; his claim was that changes would literally cause psychological breakdowns in people. Not just the odd crazy person, but a LOT of people.

A lot of people seem pretty fucking crazy to me. Angry, depressed, anxious, addicted to drugs or alchohol, disconnected from reality. These aren’t the characteristics of people who are well adjusted to the world around them.

[BrainGlutton]

@RickJay

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?

Well, it’s not just technological change but social change, cultural change, political change, economic change, change in the very rhythms of daily life – and all of that has been steadily accelerating – or, at least, intermittently accelerating – ever since the Renaissance. As Heinlein pointed out in his 1950 essay “Where To?” (reprinted in Expanded Universe), a peasant from 1,000 BC dropped into a random village anywhere in the world in 1,000 AD would have had to learn a new language and customs, but otherwise would have found everything about life utterly familiar. Nowadays, you can live to the age of 40 and find yourself wondering if you’re still living in the same world you were born in.

Remember, also, that Toffler was writing in 1970, when the changes seemed truly astonishing, and there were sociopolitical upheavals that made many people seriously wonder if American society was destroying itself. Today, a terrorist like Timothy McVeigh or Osama bin Laden or the Unabomber seems like nothing but a social aberration and a nasty nuisance to be dealt with; but back then, the Weather Underground seemed like it actually might be The Shape of Things to Come.

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@Alessan

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.

I thought we were getting close to grid parity with solar power in the Southwest and wind power along tornado alley and the North East.

Of course we’ll still be using fossil fuels but we are already drilling 2 miles underground in the middle of the jungle, I don’t know how long it will be before we drill through the mantle entirely.

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@RickJay

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?

I take it you don’t know anyone with a blackberry.

I also assume your mother doesn’t call you in the middle of the night because she wants to skype with her sister in Asia (wanna trade).

[Lumpy]

Regarding space travel being a dead end: the analogy I like to use is that rockets, or chemically powered rockets at any rate, are to the exploration of space what the hot air balloon was to the science of aeronautics: the best that could be done at the time, but too limited to every really be practical. In fact the rockets we currently use are balloons, minimum weight tanks holding the fuel that’s over 90% of the deadweight of the rocket at liftoff. In hindsight, the 1960s techo-optimism about space looks like people in the 19th century thinking you could have transatlantic passenger flight using balloons.

But there is still the possibility that a new technology could provide truly economical access to space. After decades of stagnation in air-breathing flight speeds, scramjets are now finally starting to make hypersonic flight a reality. There’s even been discussion of a truly paradigm-shifting technology: the use of MHD (magnetohydrodynamic) technology to exchange energy between a hypersonic plane’s engines and the plasma sheath generated by it’s own passage through the atmosphere. Or maybe the long anticipated space elevator might actually prove practical. IOW, getting into space with rockets is a dead end, but maybe there are other ways.

[BrainGlutton]

@Lumpy

After decades of stagnation in air-breathing flight speeds, scramjets are now finally starting to make hypersonic flight a reality. There’s even been discussion of a truly paradigm-shifting technology: the use of MHD (magnetohydrodynamic) technology to exchange energy between a hypersonic plane’s engines and the plasma sheath generated by it’s own passage through the atmosphere.

Wait, how does that get a ship beyond the atmosphere?

[CutterJohn]

@BrainGlutton

Wait, how does that get a ship beyond the atmosphere?

Same way a dolphin gets above the waves.
Course it’d need a rocket to kick it into an orbit once in space, but a pretty small one.

[Lantern]

@BrainGlutton

Well, it’s not just technological change but social change, cultural change, political change, economic change, change in the very rhythms of daily life – and all of that has been steadily accelerating – or, at least, intermittently accelerating – ever since the Renaissance.

  Actually I don't think change has been accelerating at least for the last 120 years or so. You can make a strong case that the pace of change was faster in the early 20th century than it has been in the last 20 years. You had a world war, the rise of communism and nationalism, the suffragette movement, the liberalization of social mores, electrification, the automobile, the radio, cinema, early flight and so on. 

In some areas change has decelerated since Toffler wrote his book.  As mentioned earlier technologies like space travel and atomic energy have proved to be disappointing. Compared to earlier decades there has been relatively little progress in  transportation. Basically there has been huge progress in one broad area, IT and communications, and relatively little in other areas. And people don't seem to have had much of a problem coping with what change has happened.

[merrick]

I have a theory about this. It’s often said that technologies only become really influential when they become pervasive - when everyone has a car, when every gadget has a microprocessor, when we can use smart materials and RFID chips and wi-fi connectivity in things so cheap and generic that they’re practically disposable.

But when a technology becomes pervasive it also becomes invisible - you don’t have an Electric Motor in your house, driving all your labour-saving gadgets, you have umpteen little motors, most of which you never think of. You don’t have a Computer, controlling everything from the fridge thermostat to the home theatre, you have a hundred microprocessors, most of which you never consciously realise are there.

My theory is that innovation itself has become pervasive and invisible - there’s lots of it going on, but it’s dispersed into (individually) minor, incremental changes hidden inside familiar boxes. So while change is happening, there are no obvious Big Changes to praise/blame for it.

People talk a lot about the impact of the internet - but proving any economic return on the billions Western companies have poured into computerisation over the last generation is annoyingly difficult. Automation has gone slower than predicted - pick up a popular futurist book from 50 years ago and it’ll tell you that the polyester bodysuits and flying cars and personal jetpacks of The World of 2000 will be made by robots in 100% automated factories with perhaps a few technicians looking at dials in the control room. Outsourcing has been driven less by the Internet than by cheap, reliable long-distance telephony and container shipping - it doesn’t matter how cheap you can make something in China, if it costs more than it’s worth to get it to market. And the driving force of geopolitics, for the first time in centuries, is not the “advanced” countries streaking further and further ahead, but the rest of the world catching up.

And yet, as msmith537 points out, the work environment has changed beyond recognition in the last generation. I’m 40 - when I did my PhD (not my school homework, my PhD), I was still plotting graphs on graph paper, with a pencil.

What was the biggest new political idea in the last 30 years? The biggest new social idea? Whatever answer you come up with, it’ll sound pretty trivial to people who lived through Fascism, Communism, Civil Rights, the Counterculture, the New Deal, Prohibition, the Cold War, the Welfare State… but society has changed. And there’s no Big Reason to point to when you try and work out why your home town doesn’t look the same any more.

[BrainGlutton]

@CutterJohn

Same way a dolphin gets above the waves.
Course it’d need a rocket to kick it into an orbit once in space, but a pretty small one.

So that gives you . . .

Aerodynamically designed spaceships.

Yes!

YES!!!

The Future will be like Space Opera! Rule of Cool rules!

[An_Gadai]

@merrick

I have a theory about this. It’s often said that technologies only become really influential when they become pervasive - when everyone has a car, when every gadget has a microprocessor, when we can use smart materials and RFID chips and wi-fi connectivity in things so cheap and generic that they’re practically disposable.

I recall hearing it said as “We overestimate the effects of a new technology in the short term, but underestimate it in the long term.”

With regard to “future shock” and the present time, it would seem to me if such a phenomenon existed it would have been documented in the late 19th- early 20th centuries, another time of a lot of technological innovation. Was it or anything similar ever seen then?

[BrainGlutton]

@An_Gadai

I recall hearing it said as “We overestimate the effects of a new technology in the short term, but underestimate it in the long term.”

With regard to “future shock” and the present time, it would seem to me if such a phenomenon existed it would have been documented in the late 19th- early 20th centuries, another time of a lot of technological innovation. Was it or anything similar ever seen then?

Back then it was not so much “Future Shock” as “Future Wow!” See David Szondy’s Tales of Future Past website.

But I’m sure there was a lot of future shock then too. See The Magnificent Ambersons (1918), a story in which a rich young man, while still young, finds himself entirely flummoxed and bewildered (and personally impoverished) by the effects of industrial and technological development, in particular the automobile, on his familiar slow-paced world.

[RickJay]

@msmith537

A lot of people seem pretty fucking crazy to me. Angry, depressed, anxious, addicted to drugs or alchohol, disconnected from reality. These aren’t the characteristics of people who are well adjusted to the world around them.

Are you of the impression crazy and drug-addled people are a new phenomenon?

@Damuri_Ajashi

I take it you don’t know anyone with a blackberry.

I know a hundred people with BlackBerrys. I’ve been to the BlackBerry HQ and met the people who worked there. I know zero people for whom the existence of BlackBerrys has caused them to break down psychologically.

I mean, read “Future Shock” if you want to understand why Toffler was, ya know, wrong.

[CJJ]

@RickJay

I mean, read “Future Shock” if you want to understand why Toffler was, ya know, wrong.

I kind of agree with this; there seem to be more folks than usual commenting in this thread who haven’t read the work in question at all, or are relying on the Wikipedia summary.

Still, I think the nature of the transformation Toffler was describing in his “super-industrial age” happened decades ago. Toffler was wrong in the details and to a certain extent the sociological effects.

Granted, I read this book some 25 years ago in high school (when it had already been dissected for classroom use), but even then the class response was a general shrug. Society learned to deal with the information age, and the results have been a mixed blessing. Sounds a lot like life.

[Lantern]

It’s been a long time since I have read Toffler but IIRC he was quite prescient about the broad changes of the post-industrial era which he elaborated on in Third Wave. He probably exaggerated the speed of the changes and their psychological impact.

And if you think about it the idea that technological progress is traumatic is a bit silly. War is traumatic. Famine is traumatic. Genocide is traumatic. And yet all these have happened through history and societies generally manage to survive and move on. Human beings are generally very resilient and the idea that they will be reduced to a state of “shock” by the Internet and Blackberry is weird.

[BigT]

@CJJ

I kind of agree with this; there seem to be more folks than usual commenting in this thread who haven’t read the work in question at all, or are relying on the Wikipedia summary.

Still, I think the nature of the transformation Toffler was describing in his “super-industrial age” happened decades ago. Toffler was wrong in the details and to a certain extent the sociological effects.

Granted, I read this book some 25 years ago in high school (when it had already been dissected for classroom use), but even then the class response was a general shrug. Society learned to deal with the information age, and the results have been a mixed blessing. Sounds a lot like life.

I find it intellectually stifling to just state that a work is wrong, rather than to do what everyone else is doing and try to find what nugget of truth is in it.

And, anyways, the OP makes the explicit assumption that it is correct. Thus we have to keep it as part of the hypothetical, or we have no debate.

As for the subject: I know I’ve felt an apprehension for what may happen in the future. I’m worried that any job skill I learn will be obsolete, and that my ability to learn new things is slowing down, and I’m just in my mid twenties. I’m hitting that quarter life crisis head on. It isn’t whining, as I don’t go around telling people this, but I feel a big relief knowing there’s a name for it.

I’d think it was just my OCD, but my similarly aged friends have reported the same phenomenon. And the fact that people are studying it indicates that it isn’t localized to us…

[pravnik]

I pulled out a unread copy I picked up at a book sale for “future nostalgia” and leafed through it after reading the thread. Some of the stuff he says about “overchoice” sounds a bit like the “too much choice effect” that actually has been borne out by research, but his prediction on things like how degrees, majors, and credits will go the way of the dodo long before the year 2000 as people follow ever shifting educational plans in the “thinkbelt” of modular, mobile classrooms in railroad cars…well, didn’t quite happen. On first glance it sounds like the perspective of someone who saw the big freak out from the 50’s that the 60’s turned out to be, compounded by the unimaginiable year 2000 right around the corner, who just figured societal upheaval was going to continue to snowball from that point on.