September 12, 2023 • 44 mins
In the 1970 book “Future Shock,” futurist Alvin Toffler outlined a vision of post-industrial society in which rapid technological and social changes outstrip the average human’s ability to cope. More than half a century later, how does this idea hold up and are contemporary humans victims of future shock? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss how it seems to be panning out.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
So the world is of course always changing. We know
this to be true, and yet I don't know about
the rest of you, and this is going to probably
vary greatly. I was actually talking about my wife with
this right before I came in. She was like, what
are you recording about today? And I was like, well,
we're going to be talking about this concept future shock.
(00:38):
And she's like, oh, yeah, you've explained it to me before.
Can you explain it again? And I did and she said, oh,
that's not real. I never feel that way. So I
do want to acknowledge straight up that not everyone is
necessarily going to feel this way. It is, I guess subjective,
but I don't know. For me, I feel like there
are times when it feels like change is accelerated, or
(01:02):
that the changes that are occurring in the world social
to our technology, technological or scientific or what have you, geopolitical,
et cetera, are are kind of like the topiary animals
in Stephen King's novel The Shining in the book as
opposed to the Stanley Kubrick movie. It's it's not a
hedge maze, it's hedge animals. And you look away, and
(01:24):
then you look back and they've moved in closer. So
it's sometimes it feels like that to me, with with
advancements and technological advancements and so forth, that they've been
steadily advancing on is while our backs are turned, and
it's and we only begin to notice, perhaps seemingly too late,
that oh, these these things are basically here.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Okay, So you're saying in this episode or this series,
you wanted to talk about the idea of future shock,
and this is brought on by some recent feelings about technology,
primarily AI.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
Yeah, I mean, I think AI is is one of
the main metrics of change that a lot of people
are talking about right now. AI has come up on
the show quite a bit over the years, and including
the idea of AIS and creativity as recently as just
a couple of years ago. Me personally, I found that
these concepts felt exciting, maybe a little bit threatening, but
(02:16):
not in an immediate sense. At the same time, there
was also a lot of optimistic ideas concerning what the
future might look like with generative AI and so called
creative AI systems in place, that AI would essentially be
our partner in change. It would be a collaboration. I
(02:36):
remember seeing you know, talks about this and examples of
how this would play out. You'd adapt to using these
new tools as part of your creative process, while in
other fields individuals would reskill to adapt to the change.
You know, it seemed like there was kind of a
you know, a roadmap in place, and you know it
eased any rising future shock you might have.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
Okay, so you used to feel more or like whatever
changes are going to be brought on by AI, we're
sort of we're taking the proper steps to like cushion
those blows.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
Yeah, or at least, I mean not to say that
I wasn't exposed to other ideas and more negative views
of what could occur, but it seemed like there was
enough positivity out there that I was able to sort
of buy into it. And then I remember, before the pandemic,
at some point of Frequage year, this was I tended
to talk at the World Science Festival in which physicist
(03:29):
Max Tegmark reference to this idea, this kind of topography
of human abilities and jobs, with the idea being that
the higher elevations of this topography, like the mountain peaks,
we're going to be the most protected from the rising
sea levels of artificial intelligence. You can find this illustration online,
(03:50):
but it's like down there in the water, that's where jeopardy, chess, arithmetic,
and rote memorization are like, those are already underwater of AI.
But then as you move up through the topography, eventually
you're going to reach the heights of art, book, writing,
and science.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
So his idea was things like art, I'm looking, you've
got the image here for me to look at two
things like maybe art, cinematography, writing, science theorem proving these
are all like the peaks that are going to be
the last things that AI can reach and replicate.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
Right right, And there would be other things in the
low lens that would be kind of like next to go,
like vision and speech recognition, driving, for example. And not
to say that this is now inaccurate or anything, but
at the time when I first saw this image, you know,
it was interesting, maybe somewhat concerning, but it still didn't
feel immediate. But then in the summer of twenty twenty two,
(04:46):
I chatted with Mike Sharples, the author of Story Machines,
how computers have become creative writers. And I know we
had a lot of fun on some subsequent listener mails
using some of these technologies to generate tech But I
asked Sharples about this image, this idea from Max tech Mark,
and I, you know, ask him what he thought about
(05:07):
this projection, you know, the idea that human book writing,
for example, was in the highlands, and he said that
he thought the waters were already considerably high.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
I guess one problem maybe affecting a picture like this
or a topography like this, is that it considers book
writing as one thing. And whereas it might be quite
difficult for AI to write a certain kind of book
aimed for a certain kind of audience, it might be
quite easy for AI to write a different kind of
book with a different purpose in mind.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Yeah, yeah, I mean to sort of throw in a
sci fi example, like if you were to find out, oh,
the aliens are among us now and they are disguising
themselves as people. The disguises are horrible, but the mere
fact that they are now doing it is enough for alarm,
you know. I guess it's that sort of thing. Yeah,
because right now, you know, can AI write like, quote
(06:00):
unquote the Great American novel now? But can it do
other things that can be passed off at least in
you know, sort of like self publishing marketplace and that
sort of thing. You know, has it reached the point
where it is of concern in education, in publishing in general?
Speaker 3 (06:17):
Yes, I think I was just reading an article about
people relying on AI generated travel guides just supposed to
be you know, this is this is the kind of
thing that you might imagine AI could do well, because
it's just sourcing publicly available information from the Internet and
then compiling that into a book. And it's like, oh, okay,
(06:38):
so you can know here the restaurants you can go
to in this city or something like that. But I
think I recall in the article of his reading that
people had been sent wildly astray about these things. But
that's still stuff that seems like mere I don't know,
compilation of publicly existing factual information should be more easily
(07:01):
achievable by AI than say, writing a really beautiful, expressive
literary novel that you know is meaningful to people.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Yeah. Yeah, And I actually have a friend who experimented
with vacation planning via AI, and he thought it was amazing,
you know, what you could do. But then of course
the realization then you've got to do the legwork of
fact checking everything and making sure that it all lines up,
because you don't want to just you know, go off
with this being your main you know, bit of planning.
(07:32):
So yeah, I don't know. Recently, it seems like there
have been varying waves of you know, excitement, enthusiasm, concern, malaise,
all of this concerning generative AI. You see this wave
sort of catching people at different points. Like I remember
when I first saw what some of these visual generative
AI programs could do, I was like, wow, that's amazing.
(07:52):
Look at this, this is this is this is kind
of great. It can make a dream like reality and
you can sort of create images that no one is
going to create for commercial reasons or even you know,
for personal artistic reasons, and you can make them sort
of real. And then I, for me personally, I don't
(08:13):
know that enthusiasm waned a lot when I just sort
of begin to see sort of like the soullessness of it,
at least from my perspective, it certainly waned when I
when I saw you know, visual artists that I know
or at the very least follow online, and you know,
saw them registering their concern over how these systems worked,
how they were sourcing information. And you continue to see
(08:34):
people at different points. You know, some people out there
just discovering some of this technology, and they're at the
high point, and maybe they're going to stay up there
for a little while. So I don't know. I find
I have to sort of voice you some restraint when
interacting with people. I don't want to be the person
who's immediately trying to squash everyone's excitement for new technology.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
You know, specifically when it comes to the arts, there
has long been a kind of implicit model at work
in our culture. I'm sure you'll know what I mean
when I described this that says, well, an artist, they
will sort of have two simultaneous careers. They'll have the
stuff that they care about working on that they don't
(09:15):
expect to make money on. It's difficult to make money on,
but might actually be quite beautiful and meaningful, and we
are glad that we have that stuff in the culture.
It is enriching, even if it is not a major
source of economic of money moving from place to place.
And then on the other hand, they're like, well, they've
got to have a day job, so they do you know,
illustrations for advertisements or something like that. This kind of
(09:36):
like not very inspired and not very fulfilling, but is
the way they can use their skills to make some
money to pay the bills while they do this other thing.
And so if that secondary thing is now it's like, oh, well,
we can just get a program to do that for us.
I wonder how that affects the other half of the equation,
because now you have an artist who can't subsidize the
(10:00):
kind of art they want to do by doing this
other job.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
Yeah, yeah, I know exactly what you mean. It's it's
like saying, oh, don't worry, we're not going to replace
your your art. We just want to replace that that
side gig you had where you were doing you know,
some mockups of concepts for various projects, and yeah, that
that could that may very well be the thing that's
sustaining the other efforts.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
So I think that's one way when people have said like, oh,
you know, AI, it's not gonna it's not going to
replace great works of art that that might be kind
of missing some of the practical realities of what it
means to make a living as an artist.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Yeah, and so yeah, all this was going on, and
then it wasn't too long after this that a number
of people that that we both know lost their writing
and editing jobs to Generative AI, which seemed that was
especially a moment for me, which seemed to come just
shockingly fast that it just it's like people were saying,
(10:57):
this is the sort of thing that could occur, and
I still didn't think that it was on the cusp
of happening, and then it did.
Speaker 3 (11:03):
You thought it was farther away.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Yeah, it just it just seemed like those toperary animals
were farther off, but then suddenly they're right here. So yeah,
it just suddenly felt like a lot of these advancements. Yeah,
we're far closer to me and people around me than
they had been previously. It seemed like some of the
rosy ideas concerning how it could all play out were
maybe not quite as accurate. And I found that it
(11:26):
made me, It made me feel a bit anxious, you know.
All while everything else in the news cycle was going
on from congressional testimony about UFOs, to the sort of
general grinding stone of political coverage, to the equally suddenly
very real ramifications of climate change, which of course are
kind of are basically reflected in that Max tech mark concept,
you know, trying to understand the rising threat of AI
(11:47):
by comparing it to the rising, literal, rising sea waters
due to climate change. And of course it's it's interesting
to use one to to understand the other when both
suffer at times from this this this lack of feeling
like an immediate concern to many people, even when here
(12:08):
we are suddenly you know, just watch the news any
given day and you can see it playing out in
real time. So anyway, I didn't think about it much
at the time, but then later I was chatting with
some friends and I was reminded once more of Alvin
Toffler's nineteen seventy book Future Shock, which i'd read myself
for the first time maybe ten years ago, and I thought, well,
(12:32):
we should come back and revisit it, like I want to,
you know, wanted to revisit it. At this point in
my life. I feel like there's more to discuss in
terms of like where we are in the world at
this point, and it's just it also deals with a
number of you know, stuff to blow your mind, you know,
classic concepts of futurism and change.
Speaker 3 (12:53):
I always enjoy reading about the predictions people made about
the future from the disc in past. So this book
is now fifty three years old, is that right?
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's over a half a century old.
So it's yeah, it's interesting to look back on because,
as you might expect, so many ideas are thrown out
in this book that you know, some hauntingly hit the mark,
some are way off base, and many of them are
just sort of like a snapshot of the time, like imagining. Yeah,
(13:27):
that this is this is a book that came together
in the late nineteen sixties, you know, at this point
of you know, drastic change in America, in the world,
and this is what one individual or a pair of
individuals put together about all of it.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
There is a lot about hippies in this book.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of looking to what is
the hippie culture subculture doing and how can this be
like a magic ball in a sense to understand the future.
And some of it does pan out, like some of
the future predictions by looking at the hippies works, other
things not so much, you know, so we'll definitely get
into some of those examples.
Speaker 3 (14:05):
Yeah. So, as I was saying, I love these things,
even when they're ludicrously wrong, you know. I like Criswell
predicts and future events such as these will concern us
all in the future because that is where we're going
to be living the rest of our lives. But I
like you so I'd never read this book before. I
just finished it for the first time literally hours before
(14:25):
we started recording here, and I was struck by Yeah,
a very interesting mix of reactions. On one hand, Future
Shock is it's exactly the kind of book that I
think one needs to be wary of, and I would
character I would put it in this category of charismatic
(14:46):
big cultural thesis books, books that have a kind of
basically easy to understand charismatic idea at the core, that's like,
here's the thing that explains what's going on in culture.
Books like that can be kind of epistemically dangerous because
it's very appealing to have to like land on a
(15:07):
theory that finally, you know, culture is so confusing, I
don't understand what's happening in the world today, and then oh,
here's a thesis that explains what's going on. Now I
finally understand it, and you can like put use that
as your lens that now the world makes sense. And
so it is a book in a way like that,
which is especially funny because there is a section in
(15:27):
the book warning about books of that sort and theories
of that sort that explain everything about culture.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Yeah, and if memory service, they do kind of acknowledge
like this book could could be exactly the sort of
thing that could be like a maladaptive reaction to future shock.
I just go all in on it exactly.
Speaker 3 (15:48):
Yeah, So they have that consciousness, and so I think
that's fair and that's a good kind of self consciousness
for the author or authors. Maybe we can talk about
whether we should be talking about the author as Alvin
Toffler or Alvin and Heidi Toffler the book I read
the author name on it was Alvin Toffler, but from
what I understand there now sort of understood to be
(16:11):
co authors, though she was sort of an anonymous co author.
Is that right, Yeah, Yeah, that's my understanding as well.
He was a writer, a journalist and a futurist. She
was a researcher and an editor. According to her oh
bit in The New York Times, she quote served an essential,
though anonymous, collaborative role alongside her celebrated husband, and she
is later in later works she is credited as co author.
(16:32):
So I think we'll probably be interchangeables.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Like sometimes we may say he when we could easily
say they, we may say Toffler, and other times we
may say the Tofflers. But I think it's widely recognized
that they work together on these.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
Okay, yeah, so for now I'll say the Tofflers. I
think the Tofflers do show that self consciousness and acknowledge
that which is useful. But like I said, it's always
good to approach books like this cautiously because there are
good books like this that can offer some good insights,
but rarely are they correct in everything they claim. And
(17:09):
also you just have to be conscious that I think
books like this can be more appealing than they deserve,
like that, you know, be like, oh, the explanatory power
they seem to offer can prove too alluring and can
kind of easily hop over our defenses to arguments that
we would notice our week in another context. Like I
(17:31):
remember at one point when it was making a point
about the diversity of options available in the world today
on things which you can you know, give your interest
to or spend your time on. It said quote book
clubs are finding it increasingly more difficult to choose monthly
selections that appeal to large numbers of divergent readers. And
(17:53):
I you know, at first you can just kind of
like read that sentence and be like yeah, yeah, And
then I stopped and I was like, wait a minute,
how would one know this? Like, no evidence of that
claim is given. It's just sort of it's something that
sounds plausible. That's probably, but I have no idea if
that statement is true. So, and there's just like a
lot of stuff like that in this book and books
(18:14):
like it, statements that kind of like they they're part
of this march of evidence toward the thesis about what's
going on in culture, and they sound plausibly enough true.
They kind of fit into the rhythm of the argument
being developed, and they just wash over you and you think, yeah, yeah, yeah,
but it's so anyway, I guess my point is when
you realize that's happening to you in a book, you
(18:36):
should stop and think, Okay, wait a minute, maybe I
should be a little cautious here.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
Yeah. I mean we've covered books of this nature before.
I mean the bicameral mind. You know, I've talked about,
you know, the works of Terrence McKenna on the show before,
and you know, these are I think these are you know,
books by individuals who had some amazing ideas, some amazing viewpoints,
some things to say that were at times important, at
(19:02):
times entertaining, and you know also sometimes perhaps you know, incorrect.
But yeah, it's like, do you go all in on it?
Do you do you go all in on the Stone
Dape hypothesis or do you just you know, you read it,
you hear it, but you also, you know, keep a
foot in in other realities as well. So yeah, I
(19:23):
think it is it is important to maybe not go
all in on an idea like this, but I still
think that, yeah, there is a lot to learn from
it and to draw out of it.
Speaker 3 (19:31):
Yeah, I mean, I think the healthy attitude is when
you're reading something like this, don't get sucked in and say, oh,
here's the person who's explaining it.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
All.
Speaker 3 (19:38):
This is now the teacher and I am the student. Instead,
you regard this as this is a person who's making
a series of claims, and like remember to evaluate those claims. Uh,
And I, like I said, I think some of the
claims made here are pretty good and are pretty insightful,
and I'll identify those as we go on.
Speaker 2 (19:55):
Now. It also helps that Future Shock just has a
great title, the title book and also the title of
the central thesis, the idea that we as individuals and
we as a society are suffering from future shock. So
it's no surprise that even even you know so certainly,
this book was a huge success when it came out,
and a lot of people read it was translated into
(20:16):
so many different languages. It's my understanding it's never been
out of print. People continue to read it and other
works by the Toddlers to this day. So a lot
of people were exposed to the ideas in this book.
But also just the title itself inspired various things. So
in the British two thousand and a d comic book
series there is a regularly occurring a section called Thrag's
(20:39):
Future Shocks. I don't think it has anything really to
do with the central premise here, other than it sounds cool.
It's a thrag or oh, it's Thark. I'm sorry, Yes,
Tharg's Future Shocks. I don't know that I've ever actually
read Tharg's Future Shocks. I've read a lot of Judge
dread over the years, but in a few things outside
of that in two thousand and a d But yeah,
(20:59):
I don't think of read Thark per.
Speaker 3 (21:02):
Se, who is the Ark?
Speaker 2 (21:04):
He's just this. He's kind of like, you know, a cripkeeper.
I think you know, Oh, okay, nice futuristic monster cripkeeper
of two thousand and eighty.
Speaker 3 (21:13):
I see.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
There was also, and I've never seen this, but from
nineteen seventy six through nineteen seventy nine, James Brown hosted
a variety show and it was called Future Shock, which,
again I don't know how the musical content here was
supposed to actually be instilling us with future shock. I
think it just sounded cool. There's also a nineteen ninety
(21:37):
four Vivian Shilling b movie called Future Shock, has Bill
Paxton in it. I haven't seen it, but I get
the impression that it is only like surface level getting
into the idea of future shock.
Speaker 3 (21:49):
I think I watched it maybe freshman year of college.
I do not remember anything about it at all except
that it wasn't good.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
It's not what the tour de four that Soultaker was right,
wasn't she also in Soultakers I don't remember a celt
Taker movie. Okay, oh, but we're bearing the lead here
because there was also a wonderful nineteen seventy two documentary
based on the book Future Shock, covering some of the
(22:18):
you know, the key ideas involved here, hosted by Orson Wells.
Speaker 3 (22:22):
Ah the French.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
Oh boy, this is this. This you can definitely find
on streaming services, not in great quality, but in you know,
semi watchable quality. It's it's somewhat cheesy, still a lot
of fun. Certainly leads into the more theatrical aspects of
the whole premise and and where Orson Wells hams it
up a lot. But it does have some effective moments
(22:48):
of weirdness. There's there's one part very early on that
they really resonated with me when I first saw it.
It continues to sort of resonate with me. So early
in the documentary we see Worson Wells. This is like
late career Orson Welles. We see him at an airport
having apparently just landed on an airplane. He's smoking a
pipe or a cigar or something and telling us about basically,
(23:12):
the way he's talking, it sounds like, you know, he
came up with future shock, he says, in the course
of my work, which takes me to just about every
corner of the globe, I see many aspects of a
phenomenon which I'm just beginning to understand. Our modern technologies
have achieved a degree of sophistication beyond our wildest dreams.
But this technology has exacted a pretty heavy price. We
(23:35):
live in an age of anxiety, a time of stress,
and with all our sophistication, we all are in fact
the victims of our own technological strength. We are victims
of shock, of future shock. And I'm not accurately presenting
it here, but the way he delivers that last line
(23:55):
always like kind of stuck a chord with me, because
you know, Orson Welles, even a late career still as showman.
He you know, he's hamming it up a lot in
this particular documentary, but in that one line, I feel
like he pours a great deal of compassion into it.
You know, he's telling you, look, everything that you've been feeling,
perhaps without being able to identify all the causes or
even put a name to it. There's a reason you
(24:16):
feel like this, and we can put a name to it.
It's not your fault and you are not alone.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
I mean, Orson Wells is a great, great host to
sell any concept. He can really infuse it with feeling.
He's if you never listened to the outtakes of Orson
Wells recording commercials about frozen peas and getting really mad
at how the copy is bad. I recommend looking that
up every year. Peace grow there.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
I don't think I've seen that it's really good, but
you know, I feel like, you know, this is something
that perhaps some people needed to hear in nineteen seventy
and maybe some people need to hear today, you know, so,
I yeah, I thought it would be the rewarding to
revisit some aspects of the Toffler's future Shock concept here,
talk about how it stacks up or doesn't stack up
(25:06):
to today's world. And you know what we might learn
from revisiting the concept.
Speaker 3 (25:21):
Okay, so, like fifty three years on now, we're doing
a retrospective on future Shock. Well, it is the future, Joe,
it is where we're going to be living the rest
of our lives. Yes, so just a little bit more detail,
just to get some dates. Alvin Toffler lived nineteen twenty
eight through twenty sixteen.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
Hei do You Live? Nineteen twenty nine through twenty nineteen.
Alvin Toffler is credited with coining the term future shock
in a nineteen sixty five article for Horizon magazine. And
then they spent the next five years researching, interviewing, editing,
and writing putting together this book. Book first published in
nineteen seventy, and in short, it attempted to capture the
(26:03):
sort of bleeding edge of a rapidly advancing world of science, technology,
mass communications, and economics. And on these counts alone, you
know it's offensided as having predicted things like personal computers,
the Internet, cable television, and of course, the current arch
enemy of many companies, telecommuting.
Speaker 3 (26:23):
Now, one trick you can always pull as a future
ologist is to make lots of predictions. And if you,
as you know, anybody who knows anything about gambling odds knows,
if you make lots of predictions, you're just upping the
chances that some of them will hit, even if a
lot of a miss and then people remember the hits
but not the misses. However, I would say, in the
Toffler's defense, some of the things they get right, I
(26:46):
think they do get right in a pretty thoughtful way.
Like it seems actually like they're working out the steps
and predicting a in a fairly deterministic fashion, how their
world at the time would lead to this thing that
did fundamentally actually happen, though maybe not all the details
always happen the way they think. Like at one point
they do talk about a future of having personally curated,
(27:10):
personalized news feeds, but they're talking about these as print
on demand newspapers.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Yeah, so the spirit of the thing is it certainly
holds up. I mean, that's how so many people get
their news now, you know, social media feed, but it's
not a printed newspaper.
Speaker 3 (27:26):
Also, they kind of present this as if it's like
pretty much a great thing, and I think, yeah, but
you can't expect people to, you know, always work out
the implications of everything. So it's still I think that's
fairly insightful.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
Yeah, so just from the like the futureology angle, Yeah,
I think, you know, this is the kind of thing
you see in other works, either like nonfiction futureology, but
also science fiction. You know, Neuromancer by William Gibson has
some great ideas about like a virtual, you know, cyber future,
but at the same time, like they're still using facts,
machine stuff like that. I mean, so sci fi is
(28:03):
full of that. But I think one of the things,
of course, that really separates Future Shock from so many
of these other nonfiction works is that, I mean, this
is where the title comes in, right, It's not just
about what the future will consist of, but how are
human beings going to cope with these changes and the
pace of these changes. So the Topplers were apparently amazed
(28:26):
at how little at the time there seemed to be
on the topic of adaptivity, especially considering you know that
you had people talking about, you know, these are the
advancements that are going to occur, this is where our
technology is taking us, and you know, we're going to
adapt to these changes. He writes, quote, in the most
rapidly changing environment to which man has ever been exposed,
(28:48):
we remain pitifully ignorant of how the human animal copes.
And you know, it's interesting how a lot of what
he's observing it there in nineteen seventy is still the
case now, Like how many different you know, technology companies
or are pushing some sort of new thing that's going to,
you know, break the old pattern of how we live
our lives, but they haven't really worked out all the
(29:10):
potential problems, Like this is just you know, part of it,
Like here's here's how we're going to communicate now, No,
we didn't think about how this might lead to radicalization
and so forth.
Speaker 3 (29:20):
Yeah, I mean, so if the if the spirit of
the technological industries can be summed up as move fast
and break things they're trying to look at. Okay, if
humans are the things that are getting broken, how does
that happen? What happens when the humans break as a
result of these changes in technology and their downstream effects
on society?
Speaker 2 (29:41):
Yeah, and so really like what happens when humans break
due to rapid advancements and technology. That's essentially future shock
according to the Toddlers.
Speaker 3 (29:49):
Now, one thing I think again about these like big
cultural thesis books you always have to be careful of,
is it's very appealing anytime somebody says, here's how now
is totally different than anything that ever happened before and
you know, that's always it's always like appealing to think
that you live in a unique time in history in
a way. But I think the specific argument they're making
(30:12):
is pretty well grounded. In fact, I think you can
pretty well show that, like and the core of their
the factual basis of the idea of future Shock is
that technology is changing faster and changing our lives faster
than any other time in human history. And I think
they're correct about that. That's pretty much inarguable.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
I would say, Yeah, there are times though, where it's like,
let's just follow these various extrapolations of like the worst
possible you know, ramifications of a given trend. And this
is especially true in the TV special, the documentary, there's
like a part where they're talking about an artificial elbow,
one more step towards an artificial man, where it's like,
(30:57):
I mean, I guess maybe so, but really I don't know.
Speaker 3 (31:02):
Well, And also, like you could accurately point out at
the time, the density of new medical breakthroughs at you know,
in the late at the in the late sixties as
they were writing this book was just huge, Like there's
so many medical break breakthroughs recently compared to what happened
to a similar you know, ten year chunk of time
the century before or before that. So like, yes, things
(31:25):
are definitely changing faster, but that leads to parts where
they I think there's one part where they're like, you know,
with the new heart transplants and other organ transplants, will
this lead to roving gangs of murderers who kill people
to harvest their organs for transplants.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Yeah, yeah, that that seems like, wow, we're really just
following all the worst case possibilities here to this post
apocalyptic vision of liver thieves.
Speaker 3 (31:50):
Fortunately, in the future, you can also implant tracking devices
in your liver so that you can know where they
took it and who's got your liver now.
Speaker 2 (31:58):
Yeah, but then what do you do when you and
counter a man made entirely from stolen livers and now
he's a separate They don't explore that idea, but yeah,
there's that. They did hold back on a few things,
I guess.
Speaker 3 (32:10):
But actually, when you come back to the so it's
kind of funny the artificial elbow one step closer to
an artificial man, Like that's funny, but also it does
get it. Something they do in the book that I
think kind of makes sense, which is they're saying, when
we have these, say like biomedical technological biomedical breakthroughs that
can change out human body parts and maybe even can
(32:33):
affect human brains and things like that, it may well
affect It may well force us to reckon with medical
ethics problems that we've never had to consider before. And
what happens when we're facing brand new medical ethics situations
that have never existed before, and we're facing tons of
them and they're coming on rapidly, that is a real
(32:54):
thing to be concerned about, Like how fast new medical
technologies are coming online will present scenarios of things that
can be done to and with human brains and human
bodies and human embryos and things that we've never had
to work out this problem before of what's the right
thing to do here, And it puts you in a
tough situation of decision making.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And that's where the future shock again
kicks in. Yeah, the idea you think, well, an artificial
man will never make that, and then suddenly there's an
artificial man and then you're like, well, now I'm confounded.
Now I have the future shock now in discussing the
shape of future societies. In the book, it's also worth
noting the language is not always as sensitive as it
(33:36):
would be today, even as it gets some things very
wrong and some things right about the future shape of,
say the family. Specifically, in discussing the possibility of a
future in which homosexual marriage is common and in which
same sex couples use adoption to grow their families. Everything
is basically presented by the Tofflers, matter of fact, but
(33:59):
the words marriage and parents are placed in quotations, which
certainly feels offensive reading it today.
Speaker 3 (34:05):
Yeah, with these kind of things again, it's I feel
like there's a mix of things going on. At some
points it feels kind of open minded and progressive and
accepting about different ways of thinking about family arrangements and
stuff like that. But then also there are parts where
it takes it takes like moments to emphasize how weird
(34:27):
everything will feel. Uh, And I think maybe it's part
of the thesis that that would be true, that like,
there will be new social arrangements that not everyone will
will immediately accept or will know what to, you know,
how to incorporate into their view of the world, which
is just true. But sometimes it can feel like, you know,
(34:48):
they're suggesting like, wow, look at these weird people, which
is not very nice.
Speaker 2 (34:52):
Yeah. Yeah, like there's a there's certain tone deafness in
labeling a section homosexual daddies. This is a part about
parenting the concept we're just altogether futuristic and that history
and contemporary nineteen seventy did not contain plenty of gay
men who were also fathers. Yeah, so I mean that
again just that doesn't hold up. So but at the
same time, they're essentially correct on the future of same
(35:16):
sex couples and their families, while also being somewhat off
the mark when it comes to say, the possible future
of the relaxing of polygamy laws, because again coming back
to the hippies, they were like, well, hippies are living
in communes, hippies are taking it having you know, multiple spouses.
Therefore this will be part of the future as well.
(35:39):
It hasn't really worked out that way.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
Yeah, they predict like that there will be a rise
in like five parent families where each of the parents
can specialize in different things and all that, because it
will be necessary because of the technology and the economies
of the future.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
Yeah, and you see similar things in some of the
sci fi of the time period as well. Joe Haldeman's
nineteen seventy four book The Forever War. I believe we've
talked about this one on Weird House Cinema because he
was involved in the writing of Oh Goodness, Robot Jocks.
But The Forever War is a great book about interstellar
(36:16):
war fought across time and with time dilation playing an
enormous factor in the lives of the soldiers in this war,
and it it kind of progressively depicts the like the
sexual politics of an imagined future as the character central
character keeps dipping into societies and technologies that have advanced
significantly since he last like jumped across time in space.
(36:39):
And for the most part it feels, you know, pretty
like liberal in it's an open minded in its consideration
of future societies and future sexuality. But it also like
ends up, you know, you come up with sort of
futuristic lingo for describing all of this. So there are
a lot of discussions of quote unquote homo sex, which
(37:00):
which feel a bit weird reading the book today, even
if it is discussed as like a logical social progression
in the novel itself.
Speaker 3 (37:10):
Yeah, I have not read that book, but that makes sense.
And so there are plenty of things I think in
this book from fifty three years ago that did not
age wonderfully. So some of it would be like ways
of talking about things, even if I think the idea
of the authors is to portray them somewhat sympathetically, Yeah,
(37:30):
just the language used feels not as sympathetic as the
authors would probably want if they were writing it today.
Speaker 2 (37:37):
Yeah. Now, to come back to the central thesis here,
future shock itself. They do write of it as a disease,
as a quote unquote social illness. They write, future shock
(38:01):
is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival
of the future. It may well be the most important
disease of tomorrow. I do like that the premature arrival
of the future, which of course makes sense and doesn't
make sense at the same time, but does kind of
adequately sum up this feeling where it's like whoa WHOA
(38:22):
hold on? Are we already at this point in our
technological advancement?
Speaker 3 (38:27):
Well, I feel like we should get more into the
specifics of what they mean when they say future shock.
What exactly is this condition or disease or state of
being there describing.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
Well, they do point out that it does have some
things in common with the concept of culture shock, which
was already a buzzword at this time point, especially for
Americans traveling to other cultures and feeling overwhelmed by it,
and culture shock alone would probably be a fascinating topic
for us to talk about. I was reading that there
is a Canadian anthropologist by the name of kalervo Oberg
(38:59):
who in nineteen fifty four like basically mapped out this
kind of adjustment period of culture shock. So there's like
a honeymoon period and then there's this period called negotiation,
and this is a high anxiety period followed by adjustment
and then ultimately adaptation. So you know, already we have
a pre existing model of like what happens when you're
(39:20):
thrust into a different social geographic in a world. You know,
you have like maybe a period of excitement, and then
you start feeling weird about everything. Then you go through
some adjustment, and then you eventually reach this point where
you were adapted to it.
Speaker 3 (39:36):
So their idea is that future shock is like culture shock.
So culture shock is when you're plunged into a culture
that you are not adapted to, so you can't predict
people's reactions appropriately. You don't know what the customs are,
you don't understand everything that people are saying, you don't
know exactly how to communicate correctly. There are things all
(39:58):
around you that you don't know how to use or
interact with. And over time, you can't adapt to this.
In a country, as you become acclimated to the local culture,
you learn what everything's for, you learn the language, you
learn better how to communicate, you learn what the customs are,
and so forth. But what they're saying is that, imagine
there's culture shock, but it's for the whole world, and
(40:19):
it's for your own culture also, because the culture that
you're being plunged into, the unfamiliar environment is not a
different place, but it's a different time and it just
keeps changing. So unlike the culture shock, where you can
eventually you can look forward to saying, Okay, this is
a temporary experience, and then I'll go back to my
own culture where I know how to predict things and
(40:39):
how to do things and interact with people and communicate.
In this, you can't go back there's no way to
go home. There's only the future, and it's just going
to keep changing, and in fact, it's just going to
keep changing faster.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
Yeah, which, you know, just that description may may raise
some folks anxiety. Yeah, this feeling that like you can't
go back to something that felt comfortable, You're just going
to be in like technological free fall for the duration
of your life. They write that future shock quote is
a time phenomenon, a product of the greatly accelerated rate
(41:15):
of change in society. It arises from the super imposition
of a new culture on an old one. It is
culture shock in one's own society.
Speaker 3 (41:25):
And I think an important thing to understand about their
vision of culture shock is that it's not just the
standard conscious resistance to change that you know, people often exhibit,
and that we in some ways it's associated with kind
of like cultural conservatism or something that there's like a
you know, oh, I like things how they used to be.
(41:45):
I don't want them to change. Instead they're saying that, well,
of course there is that, But then there's also something
that just affects people more broadly, which is that the
technology in our surroundings is changing, and it's changing economics
and business and culture and everything so fast that even
for people who are not consciously resistant to change, they're
in a kind of state of heightened anxiety all the
(42:07):
time trying to figure out what's going on and adapt
to it.
Speaker 2 (42:12):
Yeah. Yeah, and these adaptions. You know that this is
something we'll get into in the next episode. I think,
you know, these various ideas of you know, again, like
more broadly, like what are the defining characteristics of future shock?
But also what are some of the maladaptive ways that
people end up coping with future shock? I find this
section very interesting. So, yeah, these are going to be
(42:34):
some of the key areas we dive into. The book
obviously spends a lot of time approaching the topic from
different angles social, technological, business, employment, It gets into transience,
disposable society, population issues again, modular human beings, and cybernetics,
all sorts of stuff. We're not going to try to
cover everything, but we're going to at least cover some
(42:54):
of these key bits and some of the things that
maybe spoke to us the most revisiting this concept in
the year twenty twenty three.
Speaker 3 (43:02):
All right, So yeah, I think we're gonna have to
call this first episode here, but we will be back
next time to talk about some of these central ideas
in the book, what we think about them, whether we
think they were on track or not, and what this
book like, what a book of futurology looks like fifty
years later.
Speaker 2 (43:18):
Yeah, yeah, So we will see you, gentle listeners in
the future. That'll be on Thursday. A reminder that's Stuff
to Blow Your Mind as a science podcast with core
episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, listener mail on Monday's, a
short form artifactor Monster Fact on Wednesdays, and on Fridays.
We set aside most serious concerns to just talk about
(43:39):
a weird film, and if everything goes according to plan,
this week's weird film will also be one that is
concerned to some degree with the future.
Speaker 3 (43:47):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at com intact at Stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (44:09):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
So the world is of course always changing. We know
this to be true, and yet I don't know about
the rest of you, and this is going to probably
vary greatly. I was actually talking about my wife with
this right before I came in. She was like, what
are you recording about today? And I was like, well,
we're going to be talking about this concept future shock.
(00:38):
And she's like, oh, yeah, you've explained it to me before.
Can you explain it again? And I did and she said, oh,
that's not real. I never feel that way. So I
do want to acknowledge straight up that not everyone is
necessarily going to feel this way. It is, I guess subjective,
but I don't know. For me, I feel like there
are times when it feels like change is accelerated, or
(01:02):
that the changes that are occurring in the world social
to our technology, technological or scientific or what have you, geopolitical,
et cetera, are are kind of like the topiary animals
in Stephen King's novel The Shining in the book as
opposed to the Stanley Kubrick movie. It's it's not a
hedge maze, it's hedge animals. And you look away, and
(01:24):
then you look back and they've moved in closer. So
it's sometimes it feels like that to me, with with
advancements and technological advancements and so forth, that they've been
steadily advancing on is while our backs are turned, and
it's and we only begin to notice, perhaps seemingly too late,
that oh, these these things are basically here.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Okay, So you're saying in this episode or this series,
you wanted to talk about the idea of future shock,
and this is brought on by some recent feelings about technology,
primarily AI.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
Yeah, I mean, I think AI is is one of
the main metrics of change that a lot of people
are talking about right now. AI has come up on
the show quite a bit over the years, and including
the idea of AIS and creativity as recently as just
a couple of years ago. Me personally, I found that
these concepts felt exciting, maybe a little bit threatening, but
(02:16):
not in an immediate sense. At the same time, there
was also a lot of optimistic ideas concerning what the
future might look like with generative AI and so called
creative AI systems in place, that AI would essentially be
our partner in change. It would be a collaboration. I
(02:36):
remember seeing you know, talks about this and examples of
how this would play out. You'd adapt to using these
new tools as part of your creative process, while in
other fields individuals would reskill to adapt to the change.
You know, it seemed like there was kind of a
you know, a roadmap in place, and you know it
eased any rising future shock you might have.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
Okay, so you used to feel more or like whatever
changes are going to be brought on by AI, we're
sort of we're taking the proper steps to like cushion
those blows.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
Yeah, or at least, I mean not to say that
I wasn't exposed to other ideas and more negative views
of what could occur, but it seemed like there was
enough positivity out there that I was able to sort
of buy into it. And then I remember, before the pandemic,
at some point of Frequage year, this was I tended
to talk at the World Science Festival in which physicist
(03:29):
Max Tegmark reference to this idea, this kind of topography
of human abilities and jobs, with the idea being that
the higher elevations of this topography, like the mountain peaks,
we're going to be the most protected from the rising
sea levels of artificial intelligence. You can find this illustration online,
(03:50):
but it's like down there in the water, that's where jeopardy, chess, arithmetic,
and rote memorization are like, those are already underwater of AI.
But then as you move up through the topography, eventually
you're going to reach the heights of art, book, writing,
and science.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
So his idea was things like art, I'm looking, you've
got the image here for me to look at two
things like maybe art, cinematography, writing, science theorem proving these
are all like the peaks that are going to be
the last things that AI can reach and replicate.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
Right right, And there would be other things in the
low lens that would be kind of like next to go,
like vision and speech recognition, driving, for example. And not
to say that this is now inaccurate or anything, but
at the time when I first saw this image, you know,
it was interesting, maybe somewhat concerning, but it still didn't
feel immediate. But then in the summer of twenty twenty two,
(04:46):
I chatted with Mike Sharples, the author of Story Machines,
how computers have become creative writers. And I know we
had a lot of fun on some subsequent listener mails
using some of these technologies to generate tech But I
asked Sharples about this image, this idea from Max tech Mark,
and I, you know, ask him what he thought about
(05:07):
this projection, you know, the idea that human book writing,
for example, was in the highlands, and he said that
he thought the waters were already considerably high.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
I guess one problem maybe affecting a picture like this
or a topography like this, is that it considers book
writing as one thing. And whereas it might be quite
difficult for AI to write a certain kind of book
aimed for a certain kind of audience, it might be
quite easy for AI to write a different kind of
book with a different purpose in mind.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Yeah, yeah, I mean to sort of throw in a
sci fi example, like if you were to find out, oh,
the aliens are among us now and they are disguising
themselves as people. The disguises are horrible, but the mere
fact that they are now doing it is enough for alarm,
you know. I guess it's that sort of thing. Yeah,
because right now, you know, can AI write like, quote
(06:00):
unquote the Great American novel now? But can it do
other things that can be passed off at least in
you know, sort of like self publishing marketplace and that
sort of thing. You know, has it reached the point
where it is of concern in education, in publishing in general?
Speaker 3 (06:17):
Yes, I think I was just reading an article about
people relying on AI generated travel guides just supposed to
be you know, this is this is the kind of
thing that you might imagine AI could do well, because
it's just sourcing publicly available information from the Internet and
then compiling that into a book. And it's like, oh, okay,
(06:38):
so you can know here the restaurants you can go
to in this city or something like that. But I
think I recall in the article of his reading that
people had been sent wildly astray about these things. But
that's still stuff that seems like mere I don't know,
compilation of publicly existing factual information should be more easily
(07:01):
achievable by AI than say, writing a really beautiful, expressive
literary novel that you know is meaningful to people.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Yeah. Yeah, And I actually have a friend who experimented
with vacation planning via AI, and he thought it was amazing,
you know, what you could do. But then of course
the realization then you've got to do the legwork of
fact checking everything and making sure that it all lines up,
because you don't want to just you know, go off
with this being your main you know, bit of planning.
(07:32):
So yeah, I don't know. Recently, it seems like there
have been varying waves of you know, excitement, enthusiasm, concern, malaise,
all of this concerning generative AI. You see this wave
sort of catching people at different points. Like I remember
when I first saw what some of these visual generative
AI programs could do, I was like, wow, that's amazing.
(07:52):
Look at this, this is this is this is kind
of great. It can make a dream like reality and
you can sort of create images that no one is
going to create for commercial reasons or even you know,
for personal artistic reasons, and you can make them sort
of real. And then I, for me personally, I don't
(08:13):
know that enthusiasm waned a lot when I just sort
of begin to see sort of like the soullessness of it,
at least from my perspective, it certainly waned when I
when I saw you know, visual artists that I know
or at the very least follow online, and you know,
saw them registering their concern over how these systems worked,
how they were sourcing information. And you continue to see
(08:34):
people at different points. You know, some people out there
just discovering some of this technology, and they're at the
high point, and maybe they're going to stay up there
for a little while. So I don't know. I find
I have to sort of voice you some restraint when
interacting with people. I don't want to be the person
who's immediately trying to squash everyone's excitement for new technology.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
You know, specifically when it comes to the arts, there
has long been a kind of implicit model at work
in our culture. I'm sure you'll know what I mean
when I described this that says, well, an artist, they
will sort of have two simultaneous careers. They'll have the
stuff that they care about working on that they don't
(09:15):
expect to make money on. It's difficult to make money on,
but might actually be quite beautiful and meaningful, and we
are glad that we have that stuff in the culture.
It is enriching, even if it is not a major
source of economic of money moving from place to place.
And then on the other hand, they're like, well, they've
got to have a day job, so they do you know,
illustrations for advertisements or something like that. This kind of
(09:36):
like not very inspired and not very fulfilling, but is
the way they can use their skills to make some
money to pay the bills while they do this other thing.
And so if that secondary thing is now it's like, oh, well,
we can just get a program to do that for us.
I wonder how that affects the other half of the equation,
because now you have an artist who can't subsidize the
(10:00):
kind of art they want to do by doing this
other job.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
Yeah, yeah, I know exactly what you mean. It's it's
like saying, oh, don't worry, we're not going to replace
your your art. We just want to replace that that
side gig you had where you were doing you know,
some mockups of concepts for various projects, and yeah, that
that could that may very well be the thing that's
sustaining the other efforts.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
So I think that's one way when people have said like, oh,
you know, AI, it's not gonna it's not going to
replace great works of art that that might be kind
of missing some of the practical realities of what it
means to make a living as an artist.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Yeah, and so yeah, all this was going on, and
then it wasn't too long after this that a number
of people that that we both know lost their writing
and editing jobs to Generative AI, which seemed that was
especially a moment for me, which seemed to come just
shockingly fast that it just it's like people were saying,
(10:57):
this is the sort of thing that could occur, and
I still didn't think that it was on the cusp
of happening, and then it did.
Speaker 3 (11:03):
You thought it was farther away.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Yeah, it just it just seemed like those toperary animals
were farther off, but then suddenly they're right here. So yeah,
it just suddenly felt like a lot of these advancements. Yeah,
we're far closer to me and people around me than
they had been previously. It seemed like some of the
rosy ideas concerning how it could all play out were
maybe not quite as accurate. And I found that it
(11:26):
made me, It made me feel a bit anxious, you know.
All while everything else in the news cycle was going
on from congressional testimony about UFOs, to the sort of
general grinding stone of political coverage, to the equally suddenly
very real ramifications of climate change, which of course are
kind of are basically reflected in that Max tech mark concept,
you know, trying to understand the rising threat of AI
(11:47):
by comparing it to the rising, literal, rising sea waters
due to climate change. And of course it's it's interesting
to use one to to understand the other when both
suffer at times from this this this lack of feeling
like an immediate concern to many people, even when here
(12:08):
we are suddenly you know, just watch the news any
given day and you can see it playing out in
real time. So anyway, I didn't think about it much
at the time, but then later I was chatting with
some friends and I was reminded once more of Alvin
Toffler's nineteen seventy book Future Shock, which i'd read myself
for the first time maybe ten years ago, and I thought, well,
(12:32):
we should come back and revisit it, like I want to,
you know, wanted to revisit it. At this point in
my life. I feel like there's more to discuss in
terms of like where we are in the world at
this point, and it's just it also deals with a
number of you know, stuff to blow your mind, you know,
classic concepts of futurism and change.
Speaker 3 (12:53):
I always enjoy reading about the predictions people made about
the future from the disc in past. So this book
is now fifty three years old, is that right?
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's over a half a century old.
So it's yeah, it's interesting to look back on because,
as you might expect, so many ideas are thrown out
in this book that you know, some hauntingly hit the mark,
some are way off base, and many of them are
just sort of like a snapshot of the time, like imagining. Yeah,
(13:27):
that this is this is a book that came together
in the late nineteen sixties, you know, at this point
of you know, drastic change in America, in the world,
and this is what one individual or a pair of
individuals put together about all of it.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
There is a lot about hippies in this book.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of looking to what is
the hippie culture subculture doing and how can this be
like a magic ball in a sense to understand the future.
And some of it does pan out, like some of
the future predictions by looking at the hippies works, other
things not so much, you know, so we'll definitely get
into some of those examples.
Speaker 3 (14:05):
Yeah. So, as I was saying, I love these things,
even when they're ludicrously wrong, you know. I like Criswell
predicts and future events such as these will concern us
all in the future because that is where we're going
to be living the rest of our lives. But I
like you so I'd never read this book before. I
just finished it for the first time literally hours before
(14:25):
we started recording here, and I was struck by Yeah,
a very interesting mix of reactions. On one hand, Future
Shock is it's exactly the kind of book that I
think one needs to be wary of, and I would
character I would put it in this category of charismatic
(14:46):
big cultural thesis books, books that have a kind of
basically easy to understand charismatic idea at the core, that's like,
here's the thing that explains what's going on in culture.
Books like that can be kind of epistemically dangerous because
it's very appealing to have to like land on a
(15:07):
theory that finally, you know, culture is so confusing, I
don't understand what's happening in the world today, and then oh,
here's a thesis that explains what's going on. Now I
finally understand it, and you can like put use that
as your lens that now the world makes sense. And
so it is a book in a way like that,
which is especially funny because there is a section in
(15:27):
the book warning about books of that sort and theories
of that sort that explain everything about culture.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Yeah, and if memory service, they do kind of acknowledge
like this book could could be exactly the sort of
thing that could be like a maladaptive reaction to future shock.
I just go all in on it exactly.
Speaker 3 (15:48):
Yeah, So they have that consciousness, and so I think
that's fair and that's a good kind of self consciousness
for the author or authors. Maybe we can talk about
whether we should be talking about the author as Alvin
Toffler or Alvin and Heidi Toffler the book I read
the author name on it was Alvin Toffler, but from
what I understand there now sort of understood to be
(16:11):
co authors, though she was sort of an anonymous co author.
Is that right, Yeah, Yeah, that's my understanding as well.
He was a writer, a journalist and a futurist. She
was a researcher and an editor. According to her oh
bit in The New York Times, she quote served an essential,
though anonymous, collaborative role alongside her celebrated husband, and she
is later in later works she is credited as co author.
(16:32):
So I think we'll probably be interchangeables.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Like sometimes we may say he when we could easily
say they, we may say Toffler, and other times we
may say the Tofflers. But I think it's widely recognized
that they work together on these.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
Okay, yeah, so for now I'll say the Tofflers. I
think the Tofflers do show that self consciousness and acknowledge
that which is useful. But like I said, it's always
good to approach books like this cautiously because there are
good books like this that can offer some good insights,
but rarely are they correct in everything they claim. And
(17:09):
also you just have to be conscious that I think
books like this can be more appealing than they deserve,
like that, you know, be like, oh, the explanatory power
they seem to offer can prove too alluring and can
kind of easily hop over our defenses to arguments that
we would notice our week in another context. Like I
(17:31):
remember at one point when it was making a point
about the diversity of options available in the world today
on things which you can you know, give your interest
to or spend your time on. It said quote book
clubs are finding it increasingly more difficult to choose monthly
selections that appeal to large numbers of divergent readers. And
(17:53):
I you know, at first you can just kind of
like read that sentence and be like yeah, yeah, And
then I stopped and I was like, wait a minute,
how would one know this? Like, no evidence of that
claim is given. It's just sort of it's something that
sounds plausible. That's probably, but I have no idea if
that statement is true. So, and there's just like a
lot of stuff like that in this book and books
(18:14):
like it, statements that kind of like they they're part
of this march of evidence toward the thesis about what's
going on in culture, and they sound plausibly enough true.
They kind of fit into the rhythm of the argument
being developed, and they just wash over you and you think, yeah, yeah, yeah,
but it's so anyway, I guess my point is when
you realize that's happening to you in a book, you
(18:36):
should stop and think, Okay, wait a minute, maybe I
should be a little cautious here.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
Yeah. I mean we've covered books of this nature before.
I mean the bicameral mind. You know, I've talked about,
you know, the works of Terrence McKenna on the show before,
and you know, these are I think these are you know,
books by individuals who had some amazing ideas, some amazing viewpoints,
some things to say that were at times important, at
(19:02):
times entertaining, and you know also sometimes perhaps you know, incorrect.
But yeah, it's like, do you go all in on it?
Do you do you go all in on the Stone
Dape hypothesis or do you just you know, you read it,
you hear it, but you also, you know, keep a
foot in in other realities as well. So yeah, I
(19:23):
think it is it is important to maybe not go
all in on an idea like this, but I still
think that, yeah, there is a lot to learn from
it and to draw out of it.
Speaker 3 (19:31):
Yeah, I mean, I think the healthy attitude is when
you're reading something like this, don't get sucked in and say, oh,
here's the person who's explaining it.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
All.
Speaker 3 (19:38):
This is now the teacher and I am the student. Instead,
you regard this as this is a person who's making
a series of claims, and like remember to evaluate those claims. Uh,
And I, like I said, I think some of the
claims made here are pretty good and are pretty insightful,
and I'll identify those as we go on.
Speaker 2 (19:55):
Now. It also helps that Future Shock just has a
great title, the title book and also the title of
the central thesis, the idea that we as individuals and
we as a society are suffering from future shock. So
it's no surprise that even even you know so certainly,
this book was a huge success when it came out,
and a lot of people read it was translated into
(20:16):
so many different languages. It's my understanding it's never been
out of print. People continue to read it and other
works by the Toddlers to this day. So a lot
of people were exposed to the ideas in this book.
But also just the title itself inspired various things. So
in the British two thousand and a d comic book
series there is a regularly occurring a section called Thrag's
(20:39):
Future Shocks. I don't think it has anything really to
do with the central premise here, other than it sounds cool.
It's a thrag or oh, it's Thark. I'm sorry, Yes,
Tharg's Future Shocks. I don't know that I've ever actually
read Tharg's Future Shocks. I've read a lot of Judge
dread over the years, but in a few things outside
of that in two thousand and a d But yeah,
(20:59):
I don't think of read Thark per.
Speaker 3 (21:02):
Se, who is the Ark?
Speaker 2 (21:04):
He's just this. He's kind of like, you know, a cripkeeper.
I think you know, Oh, okay, nice futuristic monster cripkeeper
of two thousand and eighty.
Speaker 3 (21:13):
I see.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
There was also, and I've never seen this, but from
nineteen seventy six through nineteen seventy nine, James Brown hosted
a variety show and it was called Future Shock, which,
again I don't know how the musical content here was
supposed to actually be instilling us with future shock. I
think it just sounded cool. There's also a nineteen ninety
(21:37):
four Vivian Shilling b movie called Future Shock, has Bill
Paxton in it. I haven't seen it, but I get
the impression that it is only like surface level getting
into the idea of future shock.
Speaker 3 (21:49):
I think I watched it maybe freshman year of college.
I do not remember anything about it at all except
that it wasn't good.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
It's not what the tour de four that Soultaker was right,
wasn't she also in Soultakers I don't remember a celt
Taker movie. Okay, oh, but we're bearing the lead here
because there was also a wonderful nineteen seventy two documentary
based on the book Future Shock, covering some of the
(22:18):
you know, the key ideas involved here, hosted by Orson Wells.
Speaker 3 (22:22):
Ah the French.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
Oh boy, this is this. This you can definitely find
on streaming services, not in great quality, but in you know,
semi watchable quality. It's it's somewhat cheesy, still a lot
of fun. Certainly leads into the more theatrical aspects of
the whole premise and and where Orson Wells hams it
up a lot. But it does have some effective moments
(22:48):
of weirdness. There's there's one part very early on that
they really resonated with me when I first saw it.
It continues to sort of resonate with me. So early
in the documentary we see Worson Wells. This is like
late career Orson Welles. We see him at an airport
having apparently just landed on an airplane. He's smoking a
pipe or a cigar or something and telling us about basically,
(23:12):
the way he's talking, it sounds like, you know, he
came up with future shock, he says, in the course
of my work, which takes me to just about every
corner of the globe, I see many aspects of a
phenomenon which I'm just beginning to understand. Our modern technologies
have achieved a degree of sophistication beyond our wildest dreams.
But this technology has exacted a pretty heavy price. We
(23:35):
live in an age of anxiety, a time of stress,
and with all our sophistication, we all are in fact
the victims of our own technological strength. We are victims
of shock, of future shock. And I'm not accurately presenting
it here, but the way he delivers that last line
(23:55):
always like kind of stuck a chord with me, because
you know, Orson Welles, even a late career still as showman.
He you know, he's hamming it up a lot in
this particular documentary, but in that one line, I feel
like he pours a great deal of compassion into it.
You know, he's telling you, look, everything that you've been feeling,
perhaps without being able to identify all the causes or
even put a name to it. There's a reason you
(24:16):
feel like this, and we can put a name to it.
It's not your fault and you are not alone.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
I mean, Orson Wells is a great, great host to
sell any concept. He can really infuse it with feeling.
He's if you never listened to the outtakes of Orson
Wells recording commercials about frozen peas and getting really mad
at how the copy is bad. I recommend looking that
up every year. Peace grow there.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
I don't think I've seen that it's really good, but
you know, I feel like, you know, this is something
that perhaps some people needed to hear in nineteen seventy
and maybe some people need to hear today, you know, so,
I yeah, I thought it would be the rewarding to
revisit some aspects of the Toffler's future Shock concept here,
talk about how it stacks up or doesn't stack up
(25:06):
to today's world. And you know what we might learn
from revisiting the concept.
Speaker 3 (25:21):
Okay, so, like fifty three years on now, we're doing
a retrospective on future Shock. Well, it is the future, Joe,
it is where we're going to be living the rest
of our lives. Yes, so just a little bit more detail,
just to get some dates. Alvin Toffler lived nineteen twenty
eight through twenty sixteen.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
Hei do You Live? Nineteen twenty nine through twenty nineteen.
Alvin Toffler is credited with coining the term future shock
in a nineteen sixty five article for Horizon magazine. And
then they spent the next five years researching, interviewing, editing,
and writing putting together this book. Book first published in
nineteen seventy, and in short, it attempted to capture the
(26:03):
sort of bleeding edge of a rapidly advancing world of science, technology,
mass communications, and economics. And on these counts alone, you
know it's offensided as having predicted things like personal computers,
the Internet, cable television, and of course, the current arch
enemy of many companies, telecommuting.
Speaker 3 (26:23):
Now, one trick you can always pull as a future
ologist is to make lots of predictions. And if you,
as you know, anybody who knows anything about gambling odds knows,
if you make lots of predictions, you're just upping the
chances that some of them will hit, even if a
lot of a miss and then people remember the hits
but not the misses. However, I would say, in the
Toffler's defense, some of the things they get right, I
(26:46):
think they do get right in a pretty thoughtful way.
Like it seems actually like they're working out the steps
and predicting a in a fairly deterministic fashion, how their
world at the time would lead to this thing that
did fundamentally actually happen, though maybe not all the details
always happen the way they think. Like at one point
they do talk about a future of having personally curated,
(27:10):
personalized news feeds, but they're talking about these as print
on demand newspapers.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Yeah, so the spirit of the thing is it certainly
holds up. I mean, that's how so many people get
their news now, you know, social media feed, but it's
not a printed newspaper.
Speaker 3 (27:26):
Also, they kind of present this as if it's like
pretty much a great thing, and I think, yeah, but
you can't expect people to, you know, always work out
the implications of everything. So it's still I think that's
fairly insightful.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
Yeah, so just from the like the futureology angle, Yeah,
I think, you know, this is the kind of thing
you see in other works, either like nonfiction futureology, but
also science fiction. You know, Neuromancer by William Gibson has
some great ideas about like a virtual, you know, cyber future,
but at the same time, like they're still using facts,
machine stuff like that. I mean, so sci fi is
(28:03):
full of that. But I think one of the things,
of course, that really separates Future Shock from so many
of these other nonfiction works is that, I mean, this
is where the title comes in, right, It's not just
about what the future will consist of, but how are
human beings going to cope with these changes and the
pace of these changes. So the Topplers were apparently amazed
(28:26):
at how little at the time there seemed to be
on the topic of adaptivity, especially considering you know that
you had people talking about, you know, these are the
advancements that are going to occur, this is where our
technology is taking us, and you know, we're going to
adapt to these changes. He writes, quote, in the most
rapidly changing environment to which man has ever been exposed,
(28:48):
we remain pitifully ignorant of how the human animal copes.
And you know, it's interesting how a lot of what
he's observing it there in nineteen seventy is still the
case now, Like how many different you know, technology companies
or are pushing some sort of new thing that's going to,
you know, break the old pattern of how we live
our lives, but they haven't really worked out all the
(29:10):
potential problems, Like this is just you know, part of it,
Like here's here's how we're going to communicate now, No,
we didn't think about how this might lead to radicalization
and so forth.
Speaker 3 (29:20):
Yeah, I mean, so if the if the spirit of
the technological industries can be summed up as move fast
and break things they're trying to look at. Okay, if
humans are the things that are getting broken, how does
that happen? What happens when the humans break as a
result of these changes in technology and their downstream effects
on society?
Speaker 2 (29:41):
Yeah, and so really like what happens when humans break
due to rapid advancements and technology. That's essentially future shock
according to the Toddlers.
Speaker 3 (29:49):
Now, one thing I think again about these like big
cultural thesis books you always have to be careful of,
is it's very appealing anytime somebody says, here's how now
is totally different than anything that ever happened before and
you know, that's always it's always like appealing to think
that you live in a unique time in history in
a way. But I think the specific argument they're making
(30:12):
is pretty well grounded. In fact, I think you can
pretty well show that, like and the core of their
the factual basis of the idea of future Shock is
that technology is changing faster and changing our lives faster
than any other time in human history. And I think
they're correct about that. That's pretty much inarguable.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
I would say, Yeah, there are times though, where it's like,
let's just follow these various extrapolations of like the worst
possible you know, ramifications of a given trend. And this
is especially true in the TV special, the documentary, there's
like a part where they're talking about an artificial elbow,
one more step towards an artificial man, where it's like,
(30:57):
I mean, I guess maybe so, but really I don't know.
Speaker 3 (31:02):
Well, And also, like you could accurately point out at
the time, the density of new medical breakthroughs at you know,
in the late at the in the late sixties as
they were writing this book was just huge, Like there's
so many medical break breakthroughs recently compared to what happened
to a similar you know, ten year chunk of time
the century before or before that. So like, yes, things
(31:25):
are definitely changing faster, but that leads to parts where
they I think there's one part where they're like, you know,
with the new heart transplants and other organ transplants, will
this lead to roving gangs of murderers who kill people
to harvest their organs for transplants.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Yeah, yeah, that that seems like, wow, we're really just
following all the worst case possibilities here to this post
apocalyptic vision of liver thieves.
Speaker 3 (31:50):
Fortunately, in the future, you can also implant tracking devices
in your liver so that you can know where they
took it and who's got your liver now.
Speaker 2 (31:58):
Yeah, but then what do you do when you and
counter a man made entirely from stolen livers and now
he's a separate They don't explore that idea, but yeah,
there's that. They did hold back on a few things,
I guess.
Speaker 3 (32:10):
But actually, when you come back to the so it's
kind of funny the artificial elbow one step closer to
an artificial man, Like that's funny, but also it does
get it. Something they do in the book that I
think kind of makes sense, which is they're saying, when
we have these, say like biomedical technological biomedical breakthroughs that
can change out human body parts and maybe even can
(32:33):
affect human brains and things like that, it may well
affect It may well force us to reckon with medical
ethics problems that we've never had to consider before. And
what happens when we're facing brand new medical ethics situations
that have never existed before, and we're facing tons of
them and they're coming on rapidly, that is a real
(32:54):
thing to be concerned about, Like how fast new medical
technologies are coming online will present scenarios of things that
can be done to and with human brains and human
bodies and human embryos and things that we've never had
to work out this problem before of what's the right
thing to do here, And it puts you in a
tough situation of decision making.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And that's where the future shock again
kicks in. Yeah, the idea you think, well, an artificial
man will never make that, and then suddenly there's an
artificial man and then you're like, well, now I'm confounded.
Now I have the future shock now in discussing the
shape of future societies. In the book, it's also worth
noting the language is not always as sensitive as it
(33:36):
would be today, even as it gets some things very
wrong and some things right about the future shape of,
say the family. Specifically, in discussing the possibility of a
future in which homosexual marriage is common and in which
same sex couples use adoption to grow their families. Everything
is basically presented by the Tofflers, matter of fact, but
(33:59):
the words marriage and parents are placed in quotations, which
certainly feels offensive reading it today.
Speaker 3 (34:05):
Yeah, with these kind of things again, it's I feel
like there's a mix of things going on. At some
points it feels kind of open minded and progressive and
accepting about different ways of thinking about family arrangements and
stuff like that. But then also there are parts where
it takes it takes like moments to emphasize how weird
(34:27):
everything will feel. Uh, And I think maybe it's part
of the thesis that that would be true, that like,
there will be new social arrangements that not everyone will
will immediately accept or will know what to, you know,
how to incorporate into their view of the world, which
is just true. But sometimes it can feel like, you know,
(34:48):
they're suggesting like, wow, look at these weird people, which
is not very nice.
Speaker 2 (34:52):
Yeah. Yeah, like there's a there's certain tone deafness in
labeling a section homosexual daddies. This is a part about
parenting the concept we're just altogether futuristic and that history
and contemporary nineteen seventy did not contain plenty of gay
men who were also fathers. Yeah, so I mean that
again just that doesn't hold up. So but at the
same time, they're essentially correct on the future of same
(35:16):
sex couples and their families, while also being somewhat off
the mark when it comes to say, the possible future
of the relaxing of polygamy laws, because again coming back
to the hippies, they were like, well, hippies are living
in communes, hippies are taking it having you know, multiple spouses.
Therefore this will be part of the future as well.
(35:39):
It hasn't really worked out that way.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
Yeah, they predict like that there will be a rise
in like five parent families where each of the parents
can specialize in different things and all that, because it
will be necessary because of the technology and the economies
of the future.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
Yeah, and you see similar things in some of the
sci fi of the time period as well. Joe Haldeman's
nineteen seventy four book The Forever War. I believe we've
talked about this one on Weird House Cinema because he
was involved in the writing of Oh Goodness, Robot Jocks.
But The Forever War is a great book about interstellar
(36:16):
war fought across time and with time dilation playing an
enormous factor in the lives of the soldiers in this war,
and it it kind of progressively depicts the like the
sexual politics of an imagined future as the character central
character keeps dipping into societies and technologies that have advanced
significantly since he last like jumped across time in space.
(36:39):
And for the most part it feels, you know, pretty
like liberal in it's an open minded in its consideration
of future societies and future sexuality. But it also like
ends up, you know, you come up with sort of
futuristic lingo for describing all of this. So there are
a lot of discussions of quote unquote homo sex, which
(37:00):
which feel a bit weird reading the book today, even
if it is discussed as like a logical social progression
in the novel itself.
Speaker 3 (37:10):
Yeah, I have not read that book, but that makes sense.
And so there are plenty of things I think in
this book from fifty three years ago that did not
age wonderfully. So some of it would be like ways
of talking about things, even if I think the idea
of the authors is to portray them somewhat sympathetically, Yeah,
(37:30):
just the language used feels not as sympathetic as the
authors would probably want if they were writing it today.
Speaker 2 (37:37):
Yeah. Now, to come back to the central thesis here,
future shock itself. They do write of it as a disease,
as a quote unquote social illness. They write, future shock
(38:01):
is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival
of the future. It may well be the most important
disease of tomorrow. I do like that the premature arrival
of the future, which of course makes sense and doesn't
make sense at the same time, but does kind of
adequately sum up this feeling where it's like whoa WHOA
(38:22):
hold on? Are we already at this point in our
technological advancement?
Speaker 3 (38:27):
Well, I feel like we should get more into the
specifics of what they mean when they say future shock.
What exactly is this condition or disease or state of
being there describing.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
Well, they do point out that it does have some
things in common with the concept of culture shock, which
was already a buzzword at this time point, especially for
Americans traveling to other cultures and feeling overwhelmed by it,
and culture shock alone would probably be a fascinating topic
for us to talk about. I was reading that there
is a Canadian anthropologist by the name of kalervo Oberg
(38:59):
who in nineteen fifty four like basically mapped out this
kind of adjustment period of culture shock. So there's like
a honeymoon period and then there's this period called negotiation,
and this is a high anxiety period followed by adjustment
and then ultimately adaptation. So you know, already we have
a pre existing model of like what happens when you're
(39:20):
thrust into a different social geographic in a world. You know,
you have like maybe a period of excitement, and then
you start feeling weird about everything. Then you go through
some adjustment, and then you eventually reach this point where
you were adapted to it.
Speaker 3 (39:36):
So their idea is that future shock is like culture shock.
So culture shock is when you're plunged into a culture
that you are not adapted to, so you can't predict
people's reactions appropriately. You don't know what the customs are,
you don't understand everything that people are saying, you don't
know exactly how to communicate correctly. There are things all
(39:58):
around you that you don't know how to use or
interact with. And over time, you can't adapt to this.
In a country, as you become acclimated to the local culture,
you learn what everything's for, you learn the language, you
learn better how to communicate, you learn what the customs are,
and so forth. But what they're saying is that, imagine
there's culture shock, but it's for the whole world, and
(40:19):
it's for your own culture also, because the culture that
you're being plunged into, the unfamiliar environment is not a
different place, but it's a different time and it just
keeps changing. So unlike the culture shock, where you can
eventually you can look forward to saying, Okay, this is
a temporary experience, and then I'll go back to my
own culture where I know how to predict things and
(40:39):
how to do things and interact with people and communicate.
In this, you can't go back there's no way to
go home. There's only the future, and it's just going
to keep changing, and in fact, it's just going to
keep changing faster.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
Yeah, which, you know, just that description may may raise
some folks anxiety. Yeah, this feeling that like you can't
go back to something that felt comfortable, You're just going
to be in like technological free fall for the duration
of your life. They write that future shock quote is
a time phenomenon, a product of the greatly accelerated rate
(41:15):
of change in society. It arises from the super imposition
of a new culture on an old one. It is
culture shock in one's own society.
Speaker 3 (41:25):
And I think an important thing to understand about their
vision of culture shock is that it's not just the
standard conscious resistance to change that you know, people often exhibit,
and that we in some ways it's associated with kind
of like cultural conservatism or something that there's like a
you know, oh, I like things how they used to be.
(41:45):
I don't want them to change. Instead they're saying that, well,
of course there is that, But then there's also something
that just affects people more broadly, which is that the
technology in our surroundings is changing, and it's changing economics
and business and culture and everything so fast that even
for people who are not consciously resistant to change, they're
in a kind of state of heightened anxiety all the
(42:07):
time trying to figure out what's going on and adapt
to it.
Speaker 2 (42:12):
Yeah. Yeah, and these adaptions. You know that this is
something we'll get into in the next episode. I think,
you know, these various ideas of you know, again, like
more broadly, like what are the defining characteristics of future shock?
But also what are some of the maladaptive ways that
people end up coping with future shock? I find this
section very interesting. So, yeah, these are going to be
(42:34):
some of the key areas we dive into. The book
obviously spends a lot of time approaching the topic from
different angles social, technological, business, employment, It gets into transience,
disposable society, population issues again, modular human beings, and cybernetics,
all sorts of stuff. We're not going to try to
cover everything, but we're going to at least cover some
(42:54):
of these key bits and some of the things that
maybe spoke to us the most revisiting this concept in
the year twenty twenty three.
Speaker 3 (43:02):
All right, So yeah, I think we're gonna have to
call this first episode here, but we will be back
next time to talk about some of these central ideas
in the book, what we think about them, whether we
think they were on track or not, and what this
book like, what a book of futurology looks like fifty
years later.
Speaker 2 (43:18):
Yeah, yeah, So we will see you, gentle listeners in
the future. That'll be on Thursday. A reminder that's Stuff
to Blow Your Mind as a science podcast with core
episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, listener mail on Monday's, a
short form artifactor Monster Fact on Wednesdays, and on Fridays.
We set aside most serious concerns to just talk about
(43:39):
a weird film, and if everything goes according to plan,
this week's weird film will also be one that is
concerned to some degree with the future.
Speaker 3 (43:47):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at com intact at Stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (44:09):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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