Future Shock

Ted

Rating: really liked it
This book is still in print!

To me, that's pretty amazing. It seems that many readers would rather look at someone's views about our "now" or "near now, plus or minus", written four decades ago, than opening their eyes and looking for themselves.

If I still had the book, I might be tempted to see what these old views of our "now" could have been that seem so ... prescient?

But I don't have it, got rid of it to make shelf space.

I admit that I only think I ever read the book. Someone below left an outraged comment about that - as if, had I rated the book a 5 instead of a 3, and written an effusive review, it would have made earth-shaking difference. Not my ratings/reviews! Oh well.

At any rate, the cover of my edition said something about "run-away best seller". And it was, iirc.

It's funny how books about the future are always so popular, even though everyone knows, if they think about it, that no one, including authors of said books, has a crystal ball. And without that little appliance it's pretty hard to see into the future with much accuracy.

I suspect that if one could comb through all the "future-looking" books written in past decades, it might be found that the very few which exhibited pretty remarkable prescience would have been books that, when they were published, created either hardly a ripple, or else a backlash (see below **).

Mostly we like visions of the future which are quite like our own wishes for both our own, and society's, future. But human wishes have a rather poor record of being fulfilled.

I took a quick look through the book before giving it away (to BetterWorldBooks). Toffler talks about such things as people traveling more (sure he was right about that), economists being the same as always (another bingo), technology having either unforeseen consequences (right again) or very specific predicted consequences (not so good, those predictions) - lots of things like that.

Missing are things about the triumph of Mega-capitalism, the existential threat of global warming, a world whose ecosystems are on the point of collapse, a population which is overwhelming the capacity of the earth to support it - little things like that.

** Actually a lot of those were pretty much nailed by The Limits to Growth. But while that book did create a small stir when it was published just a couple years after Toffler's, it was mostly a lot of scoffing.

So goes the future prediction industry. Not one to invest in, as far as I'm concerned. After all, we seem to have enough trouble deciding what happened in the past.

Jeffrey

Rating: really liked it
This book was written 37 years ago, and Toffler's predictions have to a great degree come true. If you've never read Toffler, he's a must. A classic. Here Toffler speaks of a "Future Shock" in which people are not able to adjust to the quickening pace of society due to technological change. There are certain advantages to technology but are humans capable of keeping up emotionally, spiritually? He speaks of an increase in bizzar behavior (I remember reading about bizzar behavior in fiction that I thought I'd never see come to light, but to a great degree over time it has become more accepted and common), susceptibility to disease (an unexplained increase in cancer), and emotional breakdowns (which appear to be at epedemic proportions). This may be dated to some, but it's an essential read for those worried about their family and its future. If you want to read more about this then get The Third Wave and Tofflers most recent book, Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives.

Jim

Rating: really liked it
I read this years ago & liked it. It's worth reading again, almost 40 years after it was originally published. It's even more true. 'Future Shock' is based on the term 'Culture Shock' & Toffler's book deals with how the future is coming at us so fast that we're all in a state of shock from dealing with the changes. His writing is excellent, often illustrating large complex ideas with understandable examples, but he doesn't over-simplify nor repeat himself.

He's written several other books, at least two to update this one. I haven't read them & I'm not sure I will. There's a good article on him & this book on Wikipedia.

It's amazing how much this book still pertains today. It's heartening to see how many of the trends he wrote about have come true - it gave me confidence in his writing. It's a pity how some haven't come true - it defies logic & often points out areas where our society is too conservative.

Sean Meriwether

Rating: really liked it
I cannot believe how much Future Shock is a part of my background. While reading it I remembered direct quotes spoken by my mother and teachers; it was hugely popular in the 70’s. Toffler’s overall thesis is that although technology has helped humankind in gaining more choices and freedom, the acceleration of change is more than the human mind can tolerate. One of the more interesting elements of the theory is the direct correlation between dramatic change (moving, changing jobs, death of a spouse) and a negative impact on health.

It is easy to pinpoint what he got wrong, like “parents” who raise children for professional couples who don’t have enough time, but he gets a lot more right. What he foresaw was a point in time where people could electronically collaborate across countries using computers, which is exactly what we do with the internet. If I had only read this 20 years ago and invested in AOL! The text is dated, speaking of women more frequently as housewives and secretaries, but the message still resonates 40 years later. We have distanced ourselves from each other because of technology, and we have had our “future shock” in regard to the unprecedented advance of technology, but overall the pluses have given us huge advances in collaboration, creative freedom, and entrepreneurship. Go into this knowing the original publication date and see a man who saw the future along before it happened.

Eric

Rating: really liked it
The book is divided into 6 parts. Part 1 introduces the basic program (death of permanence), Parts 2-4 explain the 3 factors that induce future shock: transience, novelty and diversity and Parts 5-6 bring in future shock and possibly coping strategies. For me, it was initially a very slow read, but for some reason it eventually took off into Part 3, and I found myself sold.

Toffler worries that we are hurtling towards mass feelings of "future shock" (akin to culture shock that travellers get when they go to a foreign country). The book serves as a tool for diagnosing the problem, i.e. why he thinks we'll be getting future shock, and also as a way of asking what we can do about it.

He makes some predictions (especially in the novelty section), and almost 40 years later, we see that he gets some of the wrong, at least for the time being. But that doesn't matter. It's just details, and for that matter, he himself says that although it's very easy to get things wrong, it is important to try looking into and anticipating the future.

Book is actually quite pro-technology and pro-change. Future shock comes because people today are experiencing too much change too fast. It's not that change is inherently bad, he says. Too little change and life is boring. But too much change, too much stimulation and we have trouble coping. And if you're worried about change, well there's a whole lot more of it coming right around the corner.

(Key anticipatory rebuttal: it's important to plan for the long term, but that doesn't mean that plans have to be rigid. You may very well have to revise your 20 year plans from one year to the next, or more, but it's ok. Plan fluidly, but plan ahead)

Some of his proposals don't seem terribly realistic: the idea of post-technocratic planning sounds swell and all, but I don't see any nation, democratic or otherwise sitting itself down for 5 years (he's thinking War Games and future-jury duty), taking stock and asking where it wants to be. In any case, Toffler wants to get us thinking about how we can manage change and assure humanity a soft landing into the future.

Nice read. Kinda funny to see links with No Logo and The Paradox of Choice and maybe even Getting Things Done.

Ron

Rating: really liked it
Read decades ago. Wasn't impressed by Toffler high opinion of himself nor the uniqueness of his "vision" for the future. That said, his theme seemed to be right.

In fact, as a certifiable Old Foogie, I am now experiencing the kind of "shock" he spoke of then: not just with the rapid rate of technological change but the revolution in morals and mores which is now happening.

Of course, the other aspect of this is how shockingly stupid we are about history. Not just ancient history but recent American history. Almost daily the media and academics breathlessly announce some great revelation about what happened twenty to fifty years ago. I chuckle. To those of us alive (and paying attention) then, it's not news.

Noura Algwaiz

Rating: really liked it
Alvin Toffler has put a huge amount of work in this book. It is basically about change, and he analyzes it in almost every aspect. The book was written 40 years ago, discussing how change and technological developments are shaping the future and influencing our lives. Toffler received a lot of praise for his highly accurate predictions of the future. Indeed he does deserve the praise, however he deserves even more praise for his analysis of the subject.

He revolves his discussion of change around three pillars: transience, novelty, and diversity. 1) Different aspects of life are becoming less permanent and more temporary (or transient), from the disposable products we use to the increased need for moving from city to city (for education or work), to changing the organizations where we work. This leads us to breaking up old relationships and creating new ones, moving from our old houses to new ones .. and so on. 2) Novelty increases unfamiliarity and hinders our ability to use past experience to judge the new situations we face. 3) The diversity of choice is expanding to the extent of overchoice. Toffler suggests that people follow certain lifestyles as a means to cope with the overchoice problem (I personally found this discussion very interesting and eye opening to people's behaviour ..)

Toffler emphasizes the urge to think about the future and to think differently. People (governments, educationalists, businesses, societies, parents ..) tend to face new problems with old mentalities. Toffler argues that bureaucracy is slowly being replaced with ad-hocracy, standardization with customization, the individual is loosing his attachment to his organization (work place) and replacing it with an attachment to his profession. And, in my opinion, the most critical discussion is how people's values change as they cope with change. Toffler concludes the book with strategies for survival. He emphasized, among other things, the importance of tentative goals as well as the importance of feedback in a constantly changing world.

I dont claim to have covered the main points of the book. The book is crowded with concepts and arguments which have been approached from different angles. It is a mind stretcher and a thought provoker. A huge effort has been put into it, and the fact that it was written 40 years ago multiplies the amount of praise it deserves.

Tim

Rating: really liked it
Full of insightful ideas, many of which are just as relevant now in 2012 as they were when the book was written in the 70’s – some perhaps more so. The main barrier to my enjoyment of the book is that a lot of effort is spent easing the reader into each set of ideas, and in some cases it felt huge chunks of a chapter were devoted to an idea which was concisely dealt with in a few paragraphs. The chapter on mobility, as well as the final chapter were particularly gruelling for me.
Cut away the fluff but keep the ideas (even the ideas that haven’t panned out are fascinating to read – the hit rate is very impressive), and I think in a volume of maybe 100 pages you would have an exceptional read. As it is the book asks for quite a bit of effort, but there is reward to be had if you persevere.

Anne

Rating: really liked it
The author is a little long-winded, but this book is unintentionally hilarious at times. It was social commentary written in 1970 about how quickly society and people's lives are changing. He makes some interesting points about how temporary our relationships are becoming and how technology is facing us with an overwhelming amount of options. But my favorite parts are when he starts making predictions about the future. By the year 2000, half the population will live in underwater communities! We'll be turning into cyborgs! Who wear clothes made out of paper! Good times.

Brad Acker

Rating: really liked it
Alvin Toffler is by far the most prescient author i have read; his bold predictions in this book, written 4 decades ago, are largely manifesting themselves today

Chandrashekar BC

Rating: really liked it
One amazing ride from history ( civilization) to future!!! To get a broad and deeper view about family, relationshipd, education, technology, politics, psychology, biology, inventions, life pattern..etc..etc...one must read this book and ofcourse to get a glimpse of future . One hell of a read about "CHANGE" .

Abhijeet Lele

Rating: really liked it
One of the best book by one of the best author.

Jerry

Rating: really liked it

Students in Berlin and New York, in Turin and Tokyo, capture their deans and chancellors, bring great clanking education factories to a grinding halt, and even threaten to topple governments. Police stand aside in the ghettos of New York, Washington and Chicago as ancient property laws are openly violated. Sexual standards are overthrown. Great cities are paralyzed by strikes, power failures, riots.

This is an amazing book; amazing both because of how clearly he showed the failure of bureaucracy as technological and social advancement speeds up, and amazing because of how he cannot see beyond more bureaucracy as the solution. This book reminds me a lot of David Goldhill’s Catastrophic Care. He clearly sees the problem, and then prescribes: more of the same, but harder.

There is a tendency to assume that change is perennial, that generations have always seen completely different worlds than their parents, that the generation gap has been with us since we’ve been human. But from a technological standpoint, that isn’t true. As Norbert Wiener wrote in Cybernetics and Society:

One of Columbus’ sailors would have been a valuable able seaman aboard Farragut’s ships. Even a sailor from the ship that took Saint Paul to Malta would have been quite reasonably at home as a forecastle hand on one of Joseph Conrad’s barks. A Roman cattleman from the Dacian frontier would have made quite a competent vaquero to drive longhorn steers from the plains of Texas to the terminus of the railroad, although he would have been struck with astonishment with what he found when he got there.

Toffler makes the point that if you look at generations, our current technological change has been breathtaking:

…if the last 50,000 years of man’s existence were divided into lifetimes of approximately 62 years each, there have been about 800 such lifetimes. Of these 800, fully 650 were spent in caves. Only during the last 70 lifetimes has it been possible to communicate effectively from one lifetime to another—as writing made it possible to do. Only during the last six lifetimes did masses of men ever see a printed word. Only during the last four has it been possible to measure time with any precision. Only in the last two has anyone anywhere used an electric motor. And the overwhelming majority of all the material goods we use in daily life today have been developed within the present, the 800th, lifetime.

Of course, he wrote this in 1970, almost a lifetime ago. Since he wrote that, we’ve gotten personal computers, cell phones, and the Internet. Video arcades didn’t exist then; they rose and fell in the lifetime after he wrote this book. Watergate hadn’t happened yet. The word appears once, in a footnote halfway through the book, referring only to one of the buildings in the Watergate complex.

But he manages to avoid the problem that so many hard science fiction writers face, that if you only write about things that are possible, you miss the solutions you can’t see. When he talks about the burgeoning diversification of choice when listening to the radio, he projects a future that is almost literally impossible with the technology of radio. He simply assumes that some technology will fill the human need for more diverse music and talk. He doesn’t even talk about how it will get there, although he clearly does see the potential in computer networks, that they allow us to “assemble situational groups swiftly” and abandon them as quickly.

He foresees the limited swing back to educational pluralism, especially home education, at a time when this could literally land you in jail.

He coins lots of terms, most of which were not adopted; some of which should have been. Celebrity image bombs, for example.

In a society in which instant food, instant education, and even instant cities are everyday phenomena, no product is more swiftly fabricated or more ruthlessly destroyed than the instant celebrity. Nations advancing towards super-industrialism sharply step up their output of these “psycho-economic” products. Instant celebrities burst upon the consciousness of millions like an image bomb—which is exactly what they are.

And, critically, he recognizes what few recognized at the time: that the rise of computers and automation threatened not to crush us under a giant bureaucracy but rather to overthrow bureaucratic authority.

…bureaucracies are well suited to tasks that require masses of moderately educated men to perform routine operations, and, no doubt, some such operations will continue to be performed by men in the future. Yet it is precisely such tasks that the computer and automated equipment do far better than men. It is clear that in super-industrial society many such tasks will be performed by great self-regulating systems of machines, doing away with the need for bureaucratic organization. Far from fastening the grip of bureaucracy on civilization more tightly than before, automation leads to its overthrow.

What he does miss, however, is significant. He recognized, for example, the psychologization of the economy, that people would buy not just clothing and food for its psychological value, but that “Great, globe-girdling syndicates will create super-Disneylands of a variety, scale, scope, and emotional power that is hard for us to imagine.”

He extrapolated this partly from the psychic loading that airlines used to do to entice business travelers to use their service over their competitors. He makes the mistake many science fiction authors do, as Harlan D. Mills noted in the foreword to BASIC with Style, that “in 1900 it was possible to foresee cars going 70 miles an hour, but the drivers were imagined as daredevils rather than grandmothers.”

He imagines sexoticism and super-Disneylands, but what we got was affordable air travel. For much of the super-industrial world, the world itself is our super-Disneyland. It isn’t limited to businessmen and jet-setters today.

What he missed was that the reason the airlines appealed in the way that they did is that they were a heavily regulated industry that didn’t have much leeway outside of the bounds of the government bureaucracies that controlled them. He knew that those bureaucracies were dying; he didn’t put together that this meant that airlines would be able to compete on getting from point a to point b—their core function—at lower prices, rather than on the extras that don’t get us where we want to go. Every once in a while someone nostalgic for the stewardesses and food of the old days tries to start up an old-style airline. And it fails, because for all our complaints about airlines, what we mostly want is to get where we’re going with money left over to enjoy it.

The problem is that too much is changing too fast and all of us are running the risk of a PTSD-like ailment he calls future shock.

It is the thesis of this book that there are discoverable limits to the amount of change that the human organism can absorb, and that by endlessly accelerating change without first determining these limits, we may submit masses of men to demands they simply cannot tolerate. We run the high risk of throwing them into that peculiar state that I have called future shock.

Different people react to future shock in different ways. Its symptoms also vary according to the stage and intensity of the disease. These symptoms range all the way from anxiety, hostility to helpful authority, and seemingly senseless violence, to physical illness, depression and apathy. Its victims often manifest erratic swings in interest and life-style, followed by an effort to “crawl into their shells“ through social, intellectual and emotional withdrawal. They feel constantly “bugged“ or harassed, and want desperately to reduce the number of decisions they must make.

The solution? First, we need large bureaucracies to decide now what skills will likely be needed fifty years from now. And because large bureaucracies tend to produce monocultures, we need to have lots of them, and they need to pay people to live in experimental communities. In other words, we need to maintain the factory mindset that he decries throughout the entire first three quarters of the book, with authority setting the factory in motion.

Second, we need a large bureaucracy to decide what scientific and technological breakthroughs are allowed. It would be immoral to end technological and scientific progress. But in the face of a crisis this big, a little immorality is justified.

When he talks about government funding, he almost hits the issue: government research funding overwhelms all other funding and is directed by bureaucrats rather than by what most people want their future to be. This is what results in self-driving cars that can’t tell humans from non-humans. High resolution television sets that can’t handle a car driving past your house. Dishwashers that take hours to complete their cycles.

But stuck as he is in the factory mindset, his only solution to government bureaucrats is more government bureaucrats. He fears a “techno-managerial elite”, and so wants to set up bureaucracies whose purpose is managing technological advance. Someone has to block the future equivalent of the car and the transistor and clean clothes.

…we must also design creative new political institutions… for promoting or discouraging (perhaps even banning) certain proposed technologies. We may wish to debate its form; its need is beyond dispute.

He becomes just one more seventies crisifier, falsely yelling that if we don’t turn over our freedom now, we will all go into a coma and die. It goes against almost everything he wrote in the first part of the book.

His technology blockers must ask “how will a proposed new technology affect the value system of the society?” But he does not ask “how will such a dictatorial system affect our value system?” He sidesteps this question in a passing reference, but never addresses it head-on, and it’s the most important question that should be asked of such a solution. He becomes a parody of Chesterton’s dictum in Heretics that

the weakness of all Utopias is this, that they take the greatest difficulty of man and assume it to be overcome, and then give an elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones.

He denigrates letting people buy what they want to buy as the means of choosing which technologies succeed; he calls this econocentric, but doesn’t seem to understand what this means. When companies adjust their products to meet the demands of potential customers, such as when mutual funds invest only in certain sectors, he calls these “non-economic considerations”. He seems confused by the “increasing intimacy of the links between the economic sector and powerful cultural, psychological and social forces”. By the latter, he means “customers”.

I was reminded of the excitement over the Segway several years ago. The “public agencies and corporations” thought it would revolutionize cities and change their very design. The people who would have to use them disagreed. Imagine if his proposed government-corporate partnership had decided to promote the Segway with legal force, or had wasted time discouraging a product that wasn’t going to take over anyway.

He assumes as a given that government planners are econocentric, oriented only to improving the economy, then makes the obvious observation that this is a failed model—without considering that perhaps his assumptions are wrong, even though he recognizes that government social programs tend to bring the opposite of what they were supposed to do when started.

He seems to mistake a disenchantment with technocratic planners for a disenchantment with science.

His giant bureaucracies would not operate entirely above the masses. He would implement vast games—literally, games, vaguely similar to the role-playing games that came a few years later—to draw the public, currently “political eunuchs”, into “a continuing plebiscite on the future”—in an advisory capacity. Artists might be shown the technologies of the future to advise the bureaucrats on what should be available to them.

But even if the politicians and bureaucrats were to listen to this advice, the people who say that they want better-looking stewardesses but only pay for getting from point a to point b are not going to provide the advice that gives us better air travel.

This is a big book with big ideas that transforms itself into a small book with small ideas, and would transform the world in the same way.

Eskay Theaters & Smart Homes

Rating: really liked it
The best judgement of a Future gazing book written decades ago is to simply see how the world has unfurled with respect to the predictions made by the author, and in this Toffler was alarmingly prescient with respect to changes in human behavior and societal trends that would arise as a result of greater technology that approached sentience.
However, the later chapters veer off into random tangents around the politics, culture and various other musings which are perilously close to cuckoo territory.
However, would still suggest the book as a must read for those following AI/Technology for the first 100 pages!

Jon

Rating: really liked it
Adding to my BookMooch inventory 2/25/2021: http://bookmooch.com/m/inventory/jonmoss

Condition notes: Fair condition; Yellow cover; 6th printing by Bantam Books/Random House (561 pages); purchased from local library book sale in 2009 and never cracked it open.