May 6, 2014 • 40 mins
Future Shock: Back in 1970, Alvin Toffler's book "Future Shock" envisioned a future human civilization outpaced, overstimulated and mentally stunned by relentless technological and social change. Today, we live in the very future Toffler warned everyone about. How did his predictions hold up and how can we stave off the terrors of future shock? Find out in this two-part episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm truly declare Julie.
I was on the way to work this morning, and
I was waiting on the train at the station. And then,
(00:23):
as sometimes happens in our modern world on a Wednesday,
I looked over. I saw a robotic humanoid standing there
reading a kindle, and uh, you know, I just shut down.
I just I just started screaming. And then it was
like a silent stream, you know, clutching my face. And
then I'm just just crawl into a into a corner
of the martat station and I just hold myself for
(00:46):
about fifteen twenty minutes until someone comes. Then came in
an administered medication to me, to to to wake me
back up and get me back in my body and
move me again. Yeah. Classic case of RS replicant shock. Yeah, yeah,
a s upset, a future shock, future shocked. Yeah, it's
a It's a wonderful concept and at heart it deals
(01:07):
with change, with the rate of change in our world. Um,
you know, generation after generation, we we of course clan
to illusions of consistency of continuity, as we discussed in
a recent episode, but we're always in the state of
constant change. Our society is, our bodies are, our science
or art, our values or technology. Everything is really in
(01:29):
the state of flux. But we end up sort of clinging.
I think to these these illusions that that there's a
set way that things should be. You know, well, I
think because change illustrates to us that time is ephemeral,
it's passing, and change is a real marker, right It's saying, essentially, hey,
guess what You're gonna die one day, and that's a bummer.
(01:50):
Nobody wants that. And we've talked about this before in
terms of normalcy bias. You know, even though we know
it changes on the horizon or there's something that we
need to re act to, a lot of us just
kind of go back to the baseline and like to
assume that everything is going to remain the same, even
though we have evidence swirling around us all the time
(02:11):
that changes happening. It's interesting. I think back to when
I was a kid trying to imagine what I would
be like as an adult, and it's this kind of
weird mix of ideas because obviously there were plenty of
sci fi ideas around me, and sci fi ideas about
what the future might might consist of, and so to
a certain extent, I might have imagined myself going into
(02:33):
space or that maybe being in the cards, you know.
But still my idea of my immediate future self and
my immediate surroundings was very much based in my present
of the time, without you know, without wow giving it
a lot of thought. But it was kind of like
the default setting, and we base our assumptions on the
most readily available model. I think that's because there's so
(02:53):
much routinization in our lives that it gives us this
false sense of continuity, and we're doing the same thing
over day in and day out, and so you get
the sense that there maybe maybe there is a stasis.
But also some of it is just rooted and past thinking,
past structures and audiologies, um. And I was thinking about
(03:14):
this the other day. We are at a point in
history technologically at least, where we can actually look back
in the universe past and understand that the universe has
always been changing and there's a constant rate of change,
uh in effect, and we look at this just in
terms of something like the cosmic background radiation that we
(03:36):
can measure and we can say, oh, you know, after
the Big Bang, it wasn't just you know, you know,
this void. There was always something that was going on,
and there were a great many changes that were only
now beginning to completely um understand in this coherent way
that the physical world is about entropy. Yeah. I mean,
(03:57):
you look back at older our k given primitive views
of the universe, and not all of them, but a
lot of them were exceedingly human centric. They time began
with humans, and if it ended, it ends with humans.
And our modern understanding is, of course that we're just
this blip on the on the cosmic timeline, and there
(04:18):
are things that have existed before, things that will exist afterwards.
Like we're essentially we're like beta max in the technological timeline,
you know. And at the time, it seems like we're
the most important. It seems like we're we're the thing.
But VHS is just around the corner, uh, compact us
just around the corner, the Blu ray digital, all of
it's coming well. And it's interesting that you say that
(04:40):
you you point to technology as a way to begin
to mark the passing of time. And if you look
at Moore's law, um, this is something that is the
idea that computing power doubles every two years, which brings
more and more features and greater rates of change in
terms of our technology. But Moore's law isn't just a law,
(05:00):
it's it's a it's ah, this very real idea that
is playing out that the juggernaut of technology is real,
if not in our minds. And so we begin to
see More's law at play in all sectors of our lives,
things seeming to speed up. Yeah, innovation feeds back on
the innovation of computing. Processes just become more and more
(05:22):
complicated and more and more powerful, and eventually, hypothetically we
reach that point where computer aies reach and surpass human
cognitive power. Uh, the technological singularity. That's right, when when
computers just kick us to the curb because they're like, wow,
really that's all you guys got. But in the meantime,
computers have also created just an intense amount of data,
(05:46):
and some would say that data would then give us
so much information to make choices about that we would
be in a state of over choice or information overload.
And we owe this term as well as a number
of terms we're gonna talk about here in the podcast,
and the overall theme of Future Shock to Alvin and
Heidi Toffler, authors of the Future Shock. Yes, Howdie Toddler
(06:08):
is an unacknowledged co author, but of course later on
after publication she became known as the person who also
influenced this book quite a deal. But in Future Shock,
they write, if over stimulation at the sensory level increases
the distortion with which we perceive reality, cognitive over stimulation
interferes with our ability to think. This was the first
(06:30):
time people had said, hey, look, let's take a big
view of what's going on, what's happened in the past,
what's happening in the present, in the future, and see
this rate of change and how it's affecting us. What
I love about Future Shock is that it is prophetic
in places, its hyperbolic in places. Uh, there's stuff that
holds up, there's stuff that doesn't hold up. We're gonna
(06:50):
talk about all of that in this podcast. But in
it's in what it gets right and in what it
gets wrong. It's it stands as this, uh, this this
potent exat ample of of how we've come to view
the future and and also you know, our fear of
the future, our fear of change and uh. And I
feel like anytime we're we're contemplating our fears, including the
(07:11):
fear of the future, the fear of change, the fear
of impermanence, you have to have a certain about amount
of overreaction built into the model. You know. It's kind
of like, uh, the idea of of monsters as symbols,
and they symbolize things about ourselves in our lives, and
they often have to be outrageous examples to drive home
something that is less frightening at times. Well, I think
(07:34):
it's not so much frightening to us anymore because a
lot of the concepts that are covered in this nineteen
one book are kind of old hat for us now.
But at the time it must have been just terrifying
to people. And I think that that is borne out
in the numbers, because if you look at this book
of something like six million copies worldwide, in the first year,
there were fifteen printings of this book and it's shot
(07:57):
up on the best seller lists. So people had very
real reaction to this idea. Because I think this is
probably the first time that that people had really stepped
back in this way and presented all of the information
and all the change that was on the horizon based
on the evidence at that time. And UM, now if
you look at this era of the nineteen seventies, this
(08:18):
is an important era because there's so much stuff going
on here. I mean, you have the whole peace and
love thing which is disintegrating. Um, You're seeing a lot
more strife, economic imbalance, violence. Um. The culture of the
seventies is it's just itself very interesting. Yeah, I mean,
(08:41):
just think about some of the things we have going
on during this era. We have all the psychedelic drugs,
we have Vietnam, we have rock and Roll still going strong,
we have oh yeah between two man was visiting the
moon and uh, and it seemed like we would continue
to maybe do that the in the following decades. You
(09:02):
have the birth of modern computing, the world's first general microprocessor,
the Intel four thousand and four, which came out the
in seventy one. You have fiber optics, you have microwave ovens,
so you have a lot of big changes that are occurring.
You have birth control, birth control, a lot of this
is huge. And then the sort of base stock of
all of this. I think of it this way, is
(09:24):
that science fiction has been in full bloom since the fifties. Right. Um,
you have Philip K. Dicks do Androids, dream of Electric Sheep, Right,
so you have all these ideas swirling around on how
humanity is changing and how it could potentially change in
the future. Yeah, and I think you know, in the
(09:44):
in the previous decades, you saw plenty of these like
short films like The Kitchen of Tomorrow, you know, and
these ideas of how technology was gonna affect the way
we live, but they seemed a little a little further
off in the future. But by the seventies were really
really seeing things begin to integrate around us. And it's
sort of like that that day when you realize that
(10:06):
some life event or some work uh deadline that had
been approaching is now here and you realize, Wow, the
future is here, in a in a in a way,
in a shape that I'm not quite ready for. Yeah.
And um, you know, before, like you said, in the nineties,
it was all kind of shiny and new and you know, futurist.
(10:26):
And look, this product is going to make your life
so much easier and then you fast forward to the
seventies and there's a lot of different fracturing going on
in society. And so Alvin Toffler, who at times has
been a student, radical, a welder, a newspaper reporter, and
Fortune editor um, he and his wife Heidi decided to
(10:46):
try to describe the psychological state for individuals and societies
who hold this perception that there's too much change into
short of a time period, and that there's no acknowledgement
that there's this enormous structure all change going on, and
that we're transitioning. This is really important from an industrial
society to what they call a super industrial society. Now,
(11:10):
the one criterion for for for UM trying to figure
out what is super industrial side as opposed to industrial
society is that there's more laborers and post industrial businesses
than in agriculture based businesses. And of course we do
see this, we see this flip a lot of people
going to post industrial um types of companies during this time, right,
(11:31):
So that example I gave at the beginning of the
episode about just sort of shutting down psychologically mar On Marta,
when you see an android or something that is in
a kind of handy way. The essence of future shock
the future doesn't always all the interpretations don't necessarily involve
like complete physical shutting down or madness. It's not future
(11:52):
madness per se. But we're talking about the perceived premature
arrival of the future. We're talking about the shock of
rapid change. We're talking about too much change in too
short of time. And it's important to note that all
of these things, it's going to depend on who's viewing
the present and who and what their idea of the
future is. It's gonna vary from case to case, right,
(12:14):
what's your perception of change in the world. For instance,
in a Wired article by Jason Kingdom, he referred to
quote Van Winkle syndrome, which is sort of a take
on future shock. And this is the idea that you
feel amazed and bamboozled on stumbling over an innovation that
you've failed to notice before. So you know, it's easy
(12:34):
you can have something like future shock based on something
that is actually not new at all. You just you
did weren't aware of. And if you have a hyper
awareness of what is going on in the tech, the
tech industries and and in in culture, then you're maybe
not gonna be shocked by by the next h you know,
bit on the local news about what the youth are doing. Now.
One of the reasons why we really wanted to cover
(12:56):
this topic in this book is because, um, and some
ways we feel this way today, right, we feel like
we are completely inundated with data. We are um you
know sometimes uh met with a lot of anxiety and
paralysis about all the choices before us. So the reason
that Future Shock is so interesting the book is because
(13:17):
it is a very thoughtful treatment of this topic. And
some of the stuff is still relevant today and some
of it, um, you know, the Toppler's got wrong, and
we'll discuss what they got right and what they got wrong.
But at the heart of it is this idea of
trying to um understand how these abstract and concrete systems
are working together on the human being. And this was
(13:41):
something that was that was captured in a documentary in
nineteen two. It doesn't quite I don't think it quite
gives justice to the book, because I think it plays
more on the sort of alarmist, the Cassandra elements of
the book. Because I really actually feel like the book
is presented in a in a kind of calm manner
and just saying, well, these are the things that are
going on right now. Um, but it does have this
(14:01):
sort of reefer madness flavor to it that I really love. Yeah,
the book is is absolutely wonderful and and and it
is still in print. You can still get a copy
of it. I highly recommend anyone who's interested to pick
it up. I mean you do have to put yourself
in the mindset a little bit and realize that this
is a voice of the nineteen seventies speaking to the
(14:23):
people of the nineteen seventies. For instance, that he uses
the term ropot here a robot here, Yeah, who works
on artificial intelligence. So there's some very quaint terms in there. Well,
he's also coining a lot of terms too, So um,
there are there are a lot of words that he's
rolling out that that I later realized, oh, well he
invented That's he's the first person who is actually talking
(14:44):
about this particular com Hetty Toddler actually is the person
who um created the aphorism that the only thing that
says the same as change. Um. Yes, but but if
you if you can't get ahold of the book, or
you're not sure you want to do. Check out the documentary.
It's been in its entirety on YouTube for like almost
ten years now, so it's I'm pretty sure you'll be
(15:07):
able to find it. But they made the documentary in
seventy two. It is narrated by Orson Wells, the great
Orson Wells Um who was also great in Size and
Uh and you think maybe a little bit intoxicated. He
seems a little intoxicated. And in the clips that I
saw and he's kind of a turtleneck wearing cigar puffing.
He It opens with him on a airport moving walkway.
(15:32):
He's kind of lumbering down that. Oh yeah, And that's
after our fantastic intro where there's a couple walking towards
the camera in a park setting. We can't quite see
their face because the gleam of the sun, and then
when they get closer, the blur moves out, the glare
goes away, and we see that their robots. And there's
this wonderful music because, as it turns out, um the
(15:52):
musician gil Melli did the music for the Future Shock
short film, and this is the same artist responsible for
the soundtrack for the film The Andromeda Strain as well
as Night Gallery the classic Rod Serling. So that's why
it has that refrimendous sense to it, like that wonderful,
ominous music with a little jazz, but also some some
(16:14):
wonderful synthesizer effects going on. So even if you're just
a fan of crazy cool voiceovers and and weird seventies uh,
you know, the weird seventies look and feel of things,
than Future Shock, the documentary is definitely worth checking out. Yeah,
it's great. Orson Well says, in the course of my work,
which has taken me to just about every corner of
(16:35):
the globe, I see many aspects of a phenomenon which
I am just beginning to understand. Our modern technologies have
changed the degree of sophistication beyond our wildest dreams. But
this technology has exacted a pretty heavy price. We live
in an age of anxiety and time of stress, and
with all of our sophistication, we are in fact the
(16:55):
victims of our own technological strength. We are the victims
of shock. Future shocked. Nice, that's not really well, but
you know, you get yeah, but you definitely get a
sense of it because there's a there's a gravity to everything.
He's saying, and there there's a there's a fear that
(17:15):
the film really does turn the dial up on the
fear factor of future shock and and at times it's
it's hammy and hilarious and and and I love it,
like when he's talking about an artificial elbow being quote
one more step towards an artificial man, which yes, technically,
Like there's a whole scene there where they talk about
(17:36):
about that some of the health topics, and they show
an individual whose life was saved by I can't remember
his artificial heart, art artificial heart valve or some sort
of device, but they managed to make it seem a
little scary and you have to step outside of me, like, wait,
this technology saved this guy's life, while are you trying
to convince me to be afraid of this? And and
that it's just a slippery slope to androids because it's
(17:59):
Toppler in the brings us up sort of obliquely like
at what point, and we've talked about this before, like
at what point are you augmenting ourselves and becoming transhuman now? Again,
Toughler just sort of puts that out there in the book. Um,
and it's not as if he's saying that if you
have a pacemaker, you are all of a sudden not human.
But he's bringing up the question of what direction are
we moving? Yeah. One of the important things to keep
(18:20):
in mind about Future Shock is that, even though it's
it's fun to focus on some of these uh sort
of you know, fear of the youth, fear of the
technology aspects, so much of it is about, first of all,
how is this technology affecting me in my perception of
the world, my ability to work with the world, But
also how our advances in technology, how are changes in
society and culture, how are they affecting systems that are
already in place in the world. Um. One one particular
(18:43):
aspect that is not mentioned in the book that instantly
comes to mind here is, of course, when you see
uh say uh, the Internet arriving and that being ahead
of various UH industries and systems, such as how a
napster affected the music industry, where music sharing in our
ability to digitally use music was way ahead of the
(19:04):
industry's ability to regulate it or or may make money
off of it and even understand it, and so a
certain amount of chaos erupted out of that and we
still do a certain extent are are are dealing with
the after effects of that. Yeah, and actually Toddlers, they
would say that right now that there's not the infrastructure
that's needed still that we intellectually intellectually property rights are
(19:25):
just one example of how, you know, the law has
not really kept up with what's going on on a
technological level. And we'll talk more about that and some
of their ideas about how we are still lagging behind
in those departments. But let's talk about some of the
themes covered in this book before we talk about what
the Toddlers got wrong. And we are talking about twenty
(19:46):
chapters with main themes and then about a hundred and
eight sub topics. So really the Toddlers took a massive
introspective look into what was going on and really tried
to cover all of the ground that they could. And
that's why it's such an amazing book. Yeah, it's one
of those books. You know, sometimes you read really important
works and you think I could have written that. But
(20:08):
Future Shock is one of those books that I look
at and I'm just in awe and how thorough it is.
Because some of some of the topics that they cover
here include UM over choice, pressure to keep up with
the latest technology, rapidly expanding knowledge, information overload, computer field society,
temporary consumer culture, UM, youth movements, new transient lifestyles, instant intimacy, cyborgs,
(20:31):
modular bodies, cybernetics, plastic surgery, UM, as well as robotics,
changing the definition of man, artificial insemination, test two babies,
changing families, group marriages, communes, pornography, UH, general unrest, genetics,
genetic arm races, genetic engineering, mind and body control, cloning. UM.
(20:53):
It just see it just it just changes and changes
and changes at every level of of our existence, every
level of our current nineteen seventies world. Yeah, and it's
it's really interesting the way that he approaches them because
something like um, the artificial elbow, you know that that
might lead to the cyborgs among us, which is actually
a chapter title. UM. He's basing that on what he
(21:15):
sees as modularism in architecture, because he's seeing this in
other sectors of industry, like you have this push toward
trying to make things compact, trying to make things so
that they can be transported and changed up. And he's
beginning to see in robotics, the infancy of this where
the same sort of thing is happening with the human
(21:36):
body in terms of trying to replace parts or make
them more adaptable. And that's what's so interesting about it.
Just the way that he's coming at this, or I
should say he and his wife, Heidi Toffler coming at this,
is that they're really basing that on the sort of
things that they are seeing. And it's not just in robotics,
but you know, spreading out through society. And I just
(21:58):
wanted to read this one little bit that Toffler says
about unrest and young people. And he talks a lot
about young people. It's really interesting. I mean, we have
to because it's it kind of goes back to Yates Byzantium.
Uh that no country for old men. We've always been
afraid of what the young people are doing and what
changes they're going to bring to our world. Yeah, but
it's the youth culture and and one I think one
(22:19):
of the chapters two is like the youth ghetto. But
he says it is clear that many of our young people,
products of television and instant access to oceans of information,
also become precocious intellectually but what happens to emotional development
as the ratio of vicarious experience to real experience rises.
Does the step up of vicariousness contribute to emotional maturity
(22:43):
or does it in fact retard it? This is these
are the same sort of conversations that we're having today, Exactly.
I think about that every time I used tumbler, because
a lot of a lot of young people used tumbler
as well as myself. So yeah, and we'll get more
into that, but let's take a quick break and when
we get back, we'll talk about what futures talk the
book got wrong. All right, we're back. You know you
(23:11):
mentioned some movies of the future, and in reading future Chalk,
I couldn't help but think a blade Runner and replicants
because the Toffler's touch on this this idea that one
day we could have clones or we could have robots
of ourselves, and we wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Yes,
So the idea that I think the example is that
(23:31):
you go to the store and there's a young woman
behind the register, and you have to have that moment
we try and figure out is she a real person
or is she a computer? Is she a machine of
some sort, and Topfler, of course suggests she might be
both that the answer could be a little calm, a
little calm beat huh. And then he's got an asterisk
(23:51):
next to that. And if you follow that asterix, it
actually says I'm paraphrasing. But by the way, this kind
of brings up, you know, sexual ethics between men and machine,
and we probably should figure that out one day. Although
thankfully he doesn't go deeply into that topic, or maybe
too bad he doesn't. I mean, indeed, that's a whole
topic right there. I think we've touched on that a
time or two in turn. And when we, you know,
(24:13):
to discussed human robot interactions and the idea of love
machines for lack of a better term. Yes, now, um,
In terms of cloning or creating super races, the book
says we are hurtling towards the time and we will
be able to breed both super and sub races. As
Theodore Jay Gordon put it, in the future, given the
(24:35):
ability to taylor the race, I wonder if we would
create all men equal, or would we choose to manufacture apartheid.
Might the races of the future be a superior group,
the DNA controllers, the humble servants, special athletes for the games,
research scientists with two i Q and aminutive bodies. And
then he goes on to say, we shall have the
(24:56):
power to produce races of morons or of mathematic savalants.
We shall also be able to breed babies with super
normal vision and hearing, and go on, he goes on
and on. He even goes on to say girls with
super memories and perhaps more or less than the two.
Oh wow, well there's some straight up total recall stuff
right there. Yeah. Indeed, so thankfully this is a concept
(25:20):
that either you can think you look at it too, uys,
either that's just not happening or happened, or it's going
to happen. But cloning, as we have seen, is something
that has fallen under you know, ethical guidelines and has
been restricted for a number of reasons. Yeah. I mean,
we've we've danced around with cloning, um when in terms
of animal cloning, but no one's really committed to the
(25:41):
full on human cloning effort as yet. There's just there's
just too many ethical and ultimately governmental and economic barriers
that that prevent us from from going there, and you know,
he also gets on the cloning. I could go on
and on, but there's there's one part two where he's
talking about that, where he says, quote, but clone could
also create undreamed of complications for the race. There's a
(26:04):
certain charm to the idea of Albert Einstein bequeathing copies
of himself to posterity. But what about of Hitler? Should
there be laws to regular like cloning? And of course
in this we get into this area where where he's
he's at least entertaining some of the more drastic and
uh and hyperbolic ideas about what cloning is the idea
(26:24):
that you could, oh, my goodness, they cloned Hitler. Now
we have five extra Hitlers in the world, and what
we're gonna do about it? Without realizing that even the
reverse of that cloning Albert Einstein. We've discussed in the
past what is genius, and genius is not just something
you can cook up in a pot. You know, there
are a number of factors that go into into into
what makes a great mind. Not only am I capable
(26:46):
of of of achieving of various things, but actually capable
of pulling them off as well? Yeah, there's this, Um,
remember this episode on This American Life, and it was
about a cow that had been cloned, and it was
just farmers over cow had a very distinct, very deep
relationship with this cow, right, and so yes, yes it's right.
(27:10):
And so the clone turns out to mean nothing like
this this other bowl that he had, and and it
completely disappoints him. And so on some level you have
to wonder, like there's been so much research in the
animal world in cloning that you know, perhaps we humans
have come to the conclusion that it's not really worth
it for us at this point. Um, things are not
(27:33):
going to turn out the way that we thought they would.
That that bowl, that human is not going to be
the person that you loved or the Marilyn Monroe that
the film industry wants to create again. Right, I mean,
if you clone Hitler, Hitler's clone might very well just
become a yoga teacher. You know, they're just too many
factors at play. There is like does this clone if
Hitler have have the exact same circumstances that will that
(27:54):
allow him to to reach this end point? Does do
they have the same levels of our the same levels
of power at their their fingertips to pull. They're just
so many factors there. Yeah. Now, in terms of where
the rubber meets the road here, we know that researchers
have used cloning to make human embryo for the purpose
of producing stump cells, so we know that we can
do that. But beyond that, it gets a little bit
(28:14):
tricky because cloning requires that researchers first remove the nucleus
of an egg cell, and then when that's done, they
also remove proteins that are essential to help cells divide.
Now and mice not a big problem, right, because essentially
they can replace those proteins, but they have found that
primates aren't able to do this, and as a result,
(28:35):
there's this molecular process known as imprinting. Um it does
not occur properly in cloned embryos, and they can it
can cause the fetus to spontaneously aboard or the animal
to die shortly afterward. So bear all that in mind,
along with the fact that there's like huge ethical implications
and it just doesn't seem that cloning is going to
(28:56):
be a thing. And in my thing too is that
And if cloning became a thing, I feel and you
would have to have a circumstance where again it made
sense and it was safe and uh and everything lined up.
But essentially you would get into it, into this scenario
where you would have children with only one parent, and
that's about as scary as it would be. It's not
a situation where oh, the Koch brothers uh clone themselves
(29:20):
and now they're Littlekoch brothers that are gonna inherit the
millions and they live forever and ever, you know, on
into infinity. No, they would just essentially be children, children
of a of a different genetic construction of you know,
essentially almost an a sexual construction. But they would still
be children, and they wouldn't be like the scary clone
army material or anything of that nature. Yeah, well, they
(29:42):
wouldn't have the genetic diversity. I d no, they wouldn't.
But but I feel like as children, as people, and
as a reproductive choice, I think we would we would
get used to it if it were happening. I don't
think there would be I don't think we'd have a
lot of future shock. If there was a book Susie
has one father, you know, no one parent. This would
(30:03):
be the title of the book. You know, you just explain. Oh, well,
Susie was created via cloning, so she only has one
genetic parents. Well, I mean that's the term of that test,
you babies, right, vitro fertilization. This is something that has
become the norm for us. Um. Now, another thing that
the topflers got wrong, um is economic growth. Okay. They
basically envisioned a future in which the growing global market
(30:26):
became more localized in the sense that there would be
decentralized production enacted by the consumer. Oh it's a little
like the I kea market, Right, you get the parts,
but then you put them together yourself. And they call
this pro sumption. When consumers do some are all of
the work of production. And they thought this would lead
to renewable energy working from the home and de urbanization. Yeah.
(30:50):
And it seemed like that the direction we were going
in again from the nineteen seventies, but that they were
based basing this on the idea and basic on what
the the the economist we're telling them that they quote
the problem of economic growth was licked that that all
they need to do is fine tune the system, and uh,
and we would just continue to see this exponential growth
(31:11):
along these lines. Yeah, and it would be more of
like an individual cottage system, right, and decentralized in that sense.
According to Richard Cotch, writing for Huffington Post in his
article for Things Talking got Wrong, their vision is correct
in the terms of self service, we've seen that, but
not in decentralizing the global market, he says, quote the
rise of self service supermarkets, gas stations, i kea budget, airlines, dell.
(31:35):
That's all been associated with the rise of new corporations
and a greater extension of the market as the cost
of goods and services fall. So yeah, self service fits
in there, but that only helps the companies to decrease
their bottom line. In other words, you can't stop the
marketplace there you go and where do you have markets
in the cities and the cities which they also thought
again this d organization would occur and that people would
(31:58):
move out of the cities and shift away from them.
But as the world market increases, as we know, so
as industries, because cities offer an infrastructure, they offer networking
opportunities and shared knowledge. Yeah, I mean that they really
got that one wrong, because obviously we've seen the tremendous
continued growth of urban areas and even even in an
(32:20):
age right now where technically, technically everyone in this office
could work from just about anywhere they wanted to, because
we can all work on our computers. You and I
are in the same room right now, But we could
conceivably do this from different corners of the country. Yeah,
we could skype it in, right, but but we don't,
because there are a number of additional benefits, uh for
(32:41):
business to be located in one place and to be
then and for that place to be uh in close
proximity to all these other resources. Yeah, it's you can't
necessarily have the wild West. You have to have that
structure in place, and that's what cities provide for sure. Now,
another idea that they put forth in Future Shock that
also has not really shaken out, um as they predicted
(33:03):
the idea that we would have a simplification of our
systems via powerful, powerful computers, sort of like the top
of himself. In interview with Wired, uh magazine says the
early assumptions were that the giant brain was going to
solve our problems for us, that it was going to
(33:24):
get all this information together, and that therefore life would
be simplified. What it overlooked was the fact that computers
also complexify reality. And of course this was a great
disappointment to the Soviets because they were going to centrally
plan their thing with a big computer. So this idea
that like a supercomputer is going to set in the
center of the city and then plan out how everything
(33:44):
works and make things easier is both. Uh. Yeah, there's
there's some truth to that. Computers do make things a
little more streamlined in places, but there's there's a certain
amount of complexity, both in terms of our systems that
in terms of our personal experience of reality. Yeah, if
I am remembering this correctly, we did an episode on
(34:05):
the Living Earth Simulator which tried to take it like
every data point in our existence, throw it in there
and try to predict how things we're gonna happen. So
we're talking about like weather, uh, socio economics, mean, traffic patterns, everything. Yeah,
Like they wanted to take various simulated models such as weather,
combine them all and have a complete or a complete
(34:27):
ish worldview of what the world is doing and to
simulate how these various various changes would affect other changes.
But as as weather points out to us on a
daily basis, it's not really that easy to predict what's
going to go on because there's sort of like that
butterfly effect, there's entropy in the background, and it's not
really in the background, it's just always working, honest, and
(34:49):
so we rely too heavily on routinization or trying to
predict things based off of patterns. One topic that instantly
came to mind when I was reading about this high
frequency algorithmic trading. Uh. This is of course on Wall Street.
We have computers that are doing the trading, which is
computers uh, don't have to operate at the human cognitive
(35:10):
um speed setting. You have these various transactions that are
happening almost you know, within the know, just fractions of
a second. Uh. And it's it's been very controversial, some
people champion claiming that it doesn't pose any kind of
systematic risk, that the so far so called micro crashes
that we've experienced starting anything to really get um upset about.
(35:31):
But then you have people like Nobel Prize winning economist
Michael Spence who thinks that there is a lot of
danger here and we should just ban it completely. So
again we have just the idea of letting the computers
come in and simplify something as complex and at times
chaotic as as economic trading. There that we see a
lot of division. Is it a good thing, is it
(35:52):
a bad thing? We're still feeling it out well. And
then in addition to that, we have so much data
coming in all streams from everywhere, every corner of the Earth,
from drones, from satellites, you name it. So you know,
you try to do something like the Living Earth simulator,
and who knows, maybe that will actually come to Fruition
and work one day in the way that it's meant to.
(36:14):
But for the most part, it's just trying to manage
that amount of data, right, I mean, there's so much
information on the web. I mean every day we're researching
topics and we're going on the web and finding these
various sources, and there's just so much of it. Like
the day I started here, uh some number of years
ago u nineteen hundreds, I was actually going to the library.
(36:38):
I remember checking out library books to work. And I
still pick up physical copies of books occasionally, but not
with the with the frequency that I was then because
now there's just so much more available. But still you
look at something like Wikipedia, which is UH, which which
is great. Don't get me wrong, But even in the
situation where you have all of this sort of communal
high think contributing to this vision of complete world knowledge,
(37:02):
they're still flaws in it. There's still omissions in it,
UH and UH, and that highlights some of it. The
problems with the idea of computers and UH and integrated
technology solving our our problems. Yeah, I'm being able to
come in and clean it all up and make it
tidy for us. Well, it turns out that we are
just a messy, messy people that can't be tidied. So
(37:23):
we are not picking on this book or the Tofflers
were just kind of saying that, Hey, in this incredible
book detailing what was going on in the seventies and
what might be going on in the future, there were
a couple of things that didn't come to fruition, and
they're they're interesting to look at in that way, like,
what are the things that they got wrong? In the
next episode, we're going to talk about what they got right.
(37:45):
And in some of the lingering like ramifications of what
the Topplers were trying to say in the seventies and
throughout the eighties and subsequent books. Okay, before we close out, though,
I do want to mention that the term future shock
has of course become a part out of our culture. Uh.
We still hear it to thrown around today, But in
the seventies you saw a lot of it. Like if
(38:06):
you do an IMDb search for future Shock, you'll see
various TV shows that would label an episode when and
so will be titled future Shock. You saw Tharg's Future Shocks,
which was a section of the long running British comic
two thousand a d in which various sci fi uh
sort of takes on future shock would be unveiled. Uh,
(38:26):
And most remarkable of all, James Brown hosted Future Shock
on TV UH from seventy six to seventy eight, and
it was shot right here in Atlanta, Georgia, as well
as in Augusta. Nice. I guess it was his home
place right, his birth his birth home. That's not the
correct term, but you know what I'm saying. Yeah, if
you do a YouTube search for Future Shock James Brown,
(38:48):
you will see some wonderful clips of this show, which
sadly is not as futuristic as I had hoped. That
basically it's soul Train with with just his Future Shock
in the background instead of soul Train. Um, it's it's
still one full. So some wonderful music on there, but
there are no dancing androids. I was hoping that like
big puffy outfits that were like reflective metal, metallic clicking, yeah,
(39:09):
and there would be like a lot of future shock
get old yeah lyrics about super industrialism and cloning. But yeah,
but it's an example of the word becoming a part
of our culture and just becoming this this idea that's
even if we forget what it means, it's still it's
still there in the background, all right, So definitely tune
into the next episode where we will discuss more on
(39:32):
the topic of future Shock. In the meantime, you want
to get in touch with us, you want to see
what we're talking about, what we're blogging about, what kind
of videos we've shot, what we're doing on social media.
We'll head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com. That is the place to go if you
want to remain up to date on what we're doing.
You know, because you go on Facebook, there's so much
stuff on there. You're getting information overload. You're gonna miss stuff.
(39:54):
You go to Twitter, you're gonna miss stuff. But if
you go to stuff and blow your Mind dot com,
it is there, and it's searchable, all of the podcast episodes,
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you can do that by sending an email at blow
the Minded discovery dot com. For more on this and
(40:16):
thousands of other topics, because it how stuff works dot
com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm truly declare Julie.
I was on the way to work this morning, and
I was waiting on the train at the station. And then,
(00:23):
as sometimes happens in our modern world on a Wednesday,
I looked over. I saw a robotic humanoid standing there
reading a kindle, and uh, you know, I just shut down.
I just I just started screaming. And then it was
like a silent stream, you know, clutching my face. And
then I'm just just crawl into a into a corner
of the martat station and I just hold myself for
(00:46):
about fifteen twenty minutes until someone comes. Then came in
an administered medication to me, to to to wake me
back up and get me back in my body and
move me again. Yeah. Classic case of RS replicant shock. Yeah, yeah,
a s upset, a future shock, future shocked. Yeah, it's
a It's a wonderful concept and at heart it deals
(01:07):
with change, with the rate of change in our world. Um,
you know, generation after generation, we we of course clan
to illusions of consistency of continuity, as we discussed in
a recent episode, but we're always in the state of
constant change. Our society is, our bodies are, our science
or art, our values or technology. Everything is really in
(01:29):
the state of flux. But we end up sort of clinging.
I think to these these illusions that that there's a
set way that things should be. You know, well, I
think because change illustrates to us that time is ephemeral,
it's passing, and change is a real marker, right It's saying, essentially, hey,
guess what You're gonna die one day, and that's a bummer.
(01:50):
Nobody wants that. And we've talked about this before in
terms of normalcy bias. You know, even though we know
it changes on the horizon or there's something that we
need to re act to, a lot of us just
kind of go back to the baseline and like to
assume that everything is going to remain the same, even
though we have evidence swirling around us all the time
(02:11):
that changes happening. It's interesting. I think back to when
I was a kid trying to imagine what I would
be like as an adult, and it's this kind of
weird mix of ideas because obviously there were plenty of
sci fi ideas around me, and sci fi ideas about
what the future might might consist of, and so to
a certain extent, I might have imagined myself going into
(02:33):
space or that maybe being in the cards, you know.
But still my idea of my immediate future self and
my immediate surroundings was very much based in my present
of the time, without you know, without wow giving it
a lot of thought. But it was kind of like
the default setting, and we base our assumptions on the
most readily available model. I think that's because there's so
(02:53):
much routinization in our lives that it gives us this
false sense of continuity, and we're doing the same thing
over day in and day out, and so you get
the sense that there maybe maybe there is a stasis.
But also some of it is just rooted and past thinking,
past structures and audiologies, um. And I was thinking about
(03:14):
this the other day. We are at a point in
history technologically at least, where we can actually look back
in the universe past and understand that the universe has
always been changing and there's a constant rate of change,
uh in effect, and we look at this just in
terms of something like the cosmic background radiation that we
(03:36):
can measure and we can say, oh, you know, after
the Big Bang, it wasn't just you know, you know,
this void. There was always something that was going on,
and there were a great many changes that were only
now beginning to completely um understand in this coherent way
that the physical world is about entropy. Yeah. I mean,
(03:57):
you look back at older our k given primitive views
of the universe, and not all of them, but a
lot of them were exceedingly human centric. They time began
with humans, and if it ended, it ends with humans.
And our modern understanding is, of course that we're just
this blip on the on the cosmic timeline, and there
(04:18):
are things that have existed before, things that will exist afterwards.
Like we're essentially we're like beta max in the technological timeline,
you know. And at the time, it seems like we're
the most important. It seems like we're we're the thing.
But VHS is just around the corner, uh, compact us
just around the corner, the Blu ray digital, all of
it's coming well. And it's interesting that you say that
(04:40):
you you point to technology as a way to begin
to mark the passing of time. And if you look
at Moore's law, um, this is something that is the
idea that computing power doubles every two years, which brings
more and more features and greater rates of change in
terms of our technology. But Moore's law isn't just a law,
(05:00):
it's it's a it's ah, this very real idea that
is playing out that the juggernaut of technology is real,
if not in our minds. And so we begin to
see More's law at play in all sectors of our lives,
things seeming to speed up. Yeah, innovation feeds back on
the innovation of computing. Processes just become more and more
(05:22):
complicated and more and more powerful, and eventually, hypothetically we
reach that point where computer aies reach and surpass human
cognitive power. Uh, the technological singularity. That's right, when when
computers just kick us to the curb because they're like, wow,
really that's all you guys got. But in the meantime,
computers have also created just an intense amount of data,
(05:46):
and some would say that data would then give us
so much information to make choices about that we would
be in a state of over choice or information overload.
And we owe this term as well as a number
of terms we're gonna talk about here in the podcast,
and the overall theme of Future Shock to Alvin and
Heidi Toffler, authors of the Future Shock. Yes, Howdie Toddler
(06:08):
is an unacknowledged co author, but of course later on
after publication she became known as the person who also
influenced this book quite a deal. But in Future Shock,
they write, if over stimulation at the sensory level increases
the distortion with which we perceive reality, cognitive over stimulation
interferes with our ability to think. This was the first
(06:30):
time people had said, hey, look, let's take a big
view of what's going on, what's happened in the past,
what's happening in the present, in the future, and see
this rate of change and how it's affecting us. What
I love about Future Shock is that it is prophetic
in places, its hyperbolic in places. Uh, there's stuff that
holds up, there's stuff that doesn't hold up. We're gonna
(06:50):
talk about all of that in this podcast. But in
it's in what it gets right and in what it
gets wrong. It's it stands as this, uh, this this
potent exat ample of of how we've come to view
the future and and also you know, our fear of
the future, our fear of change and uh. And I
feel like anytime we're we're contemplating our fears, including the
(07:11):
fear of the future, the fear of change, the fear
of impermanence, you have to have a certain about amount
of overreaction built into the model. You know. It's kind
of like, uh, the idea of of monsters as symbols,
and they symbolize things about ourselves in our lives, and
they often have to be outrageous examples to drive home
something that is less frightening at times. Well, I think
(07:34):
it's not so much frightening to us anymore because a
lot of the concepts that are covered in this nineteen
one book are kind of old hat for us now.
But at the time it must have been just terrifying
to people. And I think that that is borne out
in the numbers, because if you look at this book
of something like six million copies worldwide, in the first year,
there were fifteen printings of this book and it's shot
(07:57):
up on the best seller lists. So people had very
real reaction to this idea. Because I think this is
probably the first time that that people had really stepped
back in this way and presented all of the information
and all the change that was on the horizon based
on the evidence at that time. And UM, now if
you look at this era of the nineteen seventies, this
(08:18):
is an important era because there's so much stuff going
on here. I mean, you have the whole peace and
love thing which is disintegrating. Um, You're seeing a lot
more strife, economic imbalance, violence. Um. The culture of the
seventies is it's just itself very interesting. Yeah, I mean,
(08:41):
just think about some of the things we have going
on during this era. We have all the psychedelic drugs,
we have Vietnam, we have rock and Roll still going strong,
we have oh yeah between two man was visiting the
moon and uh, and it seemed like we would continue
to maybe do that the in the following decades. You
(09:02):
have the birth of modern computing, the world's first general microprocessor,
the Intel four thousand and four, which came out the
in seventy one. You have fiber optics, you have microwave ovens,
so you have a lot of big changes that are occurring.
You have birth control, birth control, a lot of this
is huge. And then the sort of base stock of
all of this. I think of it this way, is
(09:24):
that science fiction has been in full bloom since the fifties. Right. Um,
you have Philip K. Dicks do Androids, dream of Electric Sheep, Right,
so you have all these ideas swirling around on how
humanity is changing and how it could potentially change in
the future. Yeah, and I think you know, in the
(09:44):
in the previous decades, you saw plenty of these like
short films like The Kitchen of Tomorrow, you know, and
these ideas of how technology was gonna affect the way
we live, but they seemed a little a little further
off in the future. But by the seventies were really
really seeing things begin to integrate around us. And it's
sort of like that that day when you realize that
(10:06):
some life event or some work uh deadline that had
been approaching is now here and you realize, Wow, the
future is here, in a in a in a way,
in a shape that I'm not quite ready for. Yeah.
And um, you know, before, like you said, in the nineties,
it was all kind of shiny and new and you know, futurist.
(10:26):
And look, this product is going to make your life
so much easier and then you fast forward to the
seventies and there's a lot of different fracturing going on
in society. And so Alvin Toffler, who at times has
been a student, radical, a welder, a newspaper reporter, and
Fortune editor um, he and his wife Heidi decided to
(10:46):
try to describe the psychological state for individuals and societies
who hold this perception that there's too much change into
short of a time period, and that there's no acknowledgement
that there's this enormous structure all change going on, and
that we're transitioning. This is really important from an industrial
society to what they call a super industrial society. Now,
(11:10):
the one criterion for for for UM trying to figure
out what is super industrial side as opposed to industrial
society is that there's more laborers and post industrial businesses
than in agriculture based businesses. And of course we do
see this, we see this flip a lot of people
going to post industrial um types of companies during this time, right,
(11:31):
So that example I gave at the beginning of the
episode about just sort of shutting down psychologically mar On Marta,
when you see an android or something that is in
a kind of handy way. The essence of future shock
the future doesn't always all the interpretations don't necessarily involve
like complete physical shutting down or madness. It's not future
(11:52):
madness per se. But we're talking about the perceived premature
arrival of the future. We're talking about the shock of
rapid change. We're talking about too much change in too
short of time. And it's important to note that all
of these things, it's going to depend on who's viewing
the present and who and what their idea of the
future is. It's gonna vary from case to case, right,
(12:14):
what's your perception of change in the world. For instance,
in a Wired article by Jason Kingdom, he referred to
quote Van Winkle syndrome, which is sort of a take
on future shock. And this is the idea that you
feel amazed and bamboozled on stumbling over an innovation that
you've failed to notice before. So you know, it's easy
(12:34):
you can have something like future shock based on something
that is actually not new at all. You just you
did weren't aware of. And if you have a hyper
awareness of what is going on in the tech, the
tech industries and and in in culture, then you're maybe
not gonna be shocked by by the next h you know,
bit on the local news about what the youth are doing. Now.
One of the reasons why we really wanted to cover
(12:56):
this topic in this book is because, um, and some
ways we feel this way today, right, we feel like
we are completely inundated with data. We are um you
know sometimes uh met with a lot of anxiety and
paralysis about all the choices before us. So the reason
that Future Shock is so interesting the book is because
(13:17):
it is a very thoughtful treatment of this topic. And
some of the stuff is still relevant today and some
of it, um, you know, the Toppler's got wrong, and
we'll discuss what they got right and what they got wrong.
But at the heart of it is this idea of
trying to um understand how these abstract and concrete systems
are working together on the human being. And this was
(13:41):
something that was that was captured in a documentary in
nineteen two. It doesn't quite I don't think it quite
gives justice to the book, because I think it plays
more on the sort of alarmist, the Cassandra elements of
the book. Because I really actually feel like the book
is presented in a in a kind of calm manner
and just saying, well, these are the things that are
going on right now. Um, but it does have this
(14:01):
sort of reefer madness flavor to it that I really love. Yeah,
the book is is absolutely wonderful and and and it
is still in print. You can still get a copy
of it. I highly recommend anyone who's interested to pick
it up. I mean you do have to put yourself
in the mindset a little bit and realize that this
is a voice of the nineteen seventies speaking to the
(14:23):
people of the nineteen seventies. For instance, that he uses
the term ropot here a robot here, Yeah, who works
on artificial intelligence. So there's some very quaint terms in there. Well,
he's also coining a lot of terms too, So um,
there are there are a lot of words that he's
rolling out that that I later realized, oh, well he
invented That's he's the first person who is actually talking
(14:44):
about this particular com Hetty Toddler actually is the person
who um created the aphorism that the only thing that
says the same as change. Um. Yes, but but if
you if you can't get ahold of the book, or
you're not sure you want to do. Check out the documentary.
It's been in its entirety on YouTube for like almost
ten years now, so it's I'm pretty sure you'll be
(15:07):
able to find it. But they made the documentary in
seventy two. It is narrated by Orson Wells, the great
Orson Wells Um who was also great in Size and
Uh and you think maybe a little bit intoxicated. He
seems a little intoxicated. And in the clips that I
saw and he's kind of a turtleneck wearing cigar puffing.
He It opens with him on a airport moving walkway.
(15:32):
He's kind of lumbering down that. Oh yeah, And that's
after our fantastic intro where there's a couple walking towards
the camera in a park setting. We can't quite see
their face because the gleam of the sun, and then
when they get closer, the blur moves out, the glare
goes away, and we see that their robots. And there's
this wonderful music because, as it turns out, um the
(15:52):
musician gil Melli did the music for the Future Shock
short film, and this is the same artist responsible for
the soundtrack for the film The Andromeda Strain as well
as Night Gallery the classic Rod Serling. So that's why
it has that refrimendous sense to it, like that wonderful,
ominous music with a little jazz, but also some some
(16:14):
wonderful synthesizer effects going on. So even if you're just
a fan of crazy cool voiceovers and and weird seventies uh,
you know, the weird seventies look and feel of things,
than Future Shock, the documentary is definitely worth checking out. Yeah,
it's great. Orson Well says, in the course of my work,
which has taken me to just about every corner of
(16:35):
the globe, I see many aspects of a phenomenon which
I am just beginning to understand. Our modern technologies have
changed the degree of sophistication beyond our wildest dreams. But
this technology has exacted a pretty heavy price. We live
in an age of anxiety and time of stress, and
with all of our sophistication, we are in fact the
(16:55):
victims of our own technological strength. We are the victims
of shock. Future shocked. Nice, that's not really well, but
you know, you get yeah, but you definitely get a
sense of it because there's a there's a gravity to everything.
He's saying, and there there's a there's a fear that
(17:15):
the film really does turn the dial up on the
fear factor of future shock and and at times it's
it's hammy and hilarious and and and I love it,
like when he's talking about an artificial elbow being quote
one more step towards an artificial man, which yes, technically,
Like there's a whole scene there where they talk about
(17:36):
about that some of the health topics, and they show
an individual whose life was saved by I can't remember
his artificial heart, art artificial heart valve or some sort
of device, but they managed to make it seem a
little scary and you have to step outside of me, like, wait,
this technology saved this guy's life, while are you trying
to convince me to be afraid of this? And and
that it's just a slippery slope to androids because it's
(17:59):
Toppler in the brings us up sort of obliquely like
at what point, and we've talked about this before, like
at what point are you augmenting ourselves and becoming transhuman now? Again,
Toughler just sort of puts that out there in the book. Um,
and it's not as if he's saying that if you
have a pacemaker, you are all of a sudden not human.
But he's bringing up the question of what direction are
we moving? Yeah. One of the important things to keep
(18:20):
in mind about Future Shock is that, even though it's
it's fun to focus on some of these uh sort
of you know, fear of the youth, fear of the
technology aspects, so much of it is about, first of all,
how is this technology affecting me in my perception of
the world, my ability to work with the world, But
also how our advances in technology, how are changes in
society and culture, how are they affecting systems that are
already in place in the world. Um. One one particular
(18:43):
aspect that is not mentioned in the book that instantly
comes to mind here is, of course, when you see
uh say uh, the Internet arriving and that being ahead
of various UH industries and systems, such as how a
napster affected the music industry, where music sharing in our
ability to digitally use music was way ahead of the
(19:04):
industry's ability to regulate it or or may make money
off of it and even understand it, and so a
certain amount of chaos erupted out of that and we
still do a certain extent are are are dealing with
the after effects of that. Yeah, and actually Toddlers, they
would say that right now that there's not the infrastructure
that's needed still that we intellectually intellectually property rights are
(19:25):
just one example of how, you know, the law has
not really kept up with what's going on on a
technological level. And we'll talk more about that and some
of their ideas about how we are still lagging behind
in those departments. But let's talk about some of the
themes covered in this book before we talk about what
the Toddlers got wrong. And we are talking about twenty
(19:46):
chapters with main themes and then about a hundred and
eight sub topics. So really the Toddlers took a massive
introspective look into what was going on and really tried
to cover all of the ground that they could. And
that's why it's such an amazing book. Yeah, it's one
of those books. You know, sometimes you read really important
works and you think I could have written that. But
(20:08):
Future Shock is one of those books that I look
at and I'm just in awe and how thorough it is.
Because some of some of the topics that they cover
here include UM over choice, pressure to keep up with
the latest technology, rapidly expanding knowledge, information overload, computer field society,
temporary consumer culture, UM, youth movements, new transient lifestyles, instant intimacy, cyborgs,
(20:31):
modular bodies, cybernetics, plastic surgery, UM, as well as robotics,
changing the definition of man, artificial insemination, test two babies,
changing families, group marriages, communes, pornography, UH, general unrest, genetics,
genetic arm races, genetic engineering, mind and body control, cloning. UM.
(20:53):
It just see it just it just changes and changes
and changes at every level of of our existence, every
level of our current nineteen seventies world. Yeah, and it's
it's really interesting the way that he approaches them because
something like um, the artificial elbow, you know that that
might lead to the cyborgs among us, which is actually
a chapter title. UM. He's basing that on what he
(21:15):
sees as modularism in architecture, because he's seeing this in
other sectors of industry, like you have this push toward
trying to make things compact, trying to make things so
that they can be transported and changed up. And he's
beginning to see in robotics, the infancy of this where
the same sort of thing is happening with the human
(21:36):
body in terms of trying to replace parts or make
them more adaptable. And that's what's so interesting about it.
Just the way that he's coming at this, or I
should say he and his wife, Heidi Toffler coming at this,
is that they're really basing that on the sort of
things that they are seeing. And it's not just in robotics,
but you know, spreading out through society. And I just
(21:58):
wanted to read this one little bit that Toffler says
about unrest and young people. And he talks a lot
about young people. It's really interesting. I mean, we have
to because it's it kind of goes back to Yates Byzantium.
Uh that no country for old men. We've always been
afraid of what the young people are doing and what
changes they're going to bring to our world. Yeah, but
it's the youth culture and and one I think one
(22:19):
of the chapters two is like the youth ghetto. But
he says it is clear that many of our young people,
products of television and instant access to oceans of information,
also become precocious intellectually but what happens to emotional development
as the ratio of vicarious experience to real experience rises.
Does the step up of vicariousness contribute to emotional maturity
(22:43):
or does it in fact retard it? This is these
are the same sort of conversations that we're having today, Exactly.
I think about that every time I used tumbler, because
a lot of a lot of young people used tumbler
as well as myself. So yeah, and we'll get more
into that, but let's take a quick break and when
we get back, we'll talk about what futures talk the
book got wrong. All right, we're back. You know you
(23:11):
mentioned some movies of the future, and in reading future Chalk,
I couldn't help but think a blade Runner and replicants
because the Toffler's touch on this this idea that one
day we could have clones or we could have robots
of ourselves, and we wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Yes,
So the idea that I think the example is that
(23:31):
you go to the store and there's a young woman
behind the register, and you have to have that moment
we try and figure out is she a real person
or is she a computer? Is she a machine of
some sort, and Topfler, of course suggests she might be
both that the answer could be a little calm, a
little calm beat huh. And then he's got an asterisk
(23:51):
next to that. And if you follow that asterix, it
actually says I'm paraphrasing. But by the way, this kind
of brings up, you know, sexual ethics between men and machine,
and we probably should figure that out one day. Although
thankfully he doesn't go deeply into that topic, or maybe
too bad he doesn't. I mean, indeed, that's a whole
topic right there. I think we've touched on that a
time or two in turn. And when we, you know,
(24:13):
to discussed human robot interactions and the idea of love
machines for lack of a better term. Yes, now, um,
In terms of cloning or creating super races, the book
says we are hurtling towards the time and we will
be able to breed both super and sub races. As
Theodore Jay Gordon put it, in the future, given the
(24:35):
ability to taylor the race, I wonder if we would
create all men equal, or would we choose to manufacture apartheid.
Might the races of the future be a superior group,
the DNA controllers, the humble servants, special athletes for the games,
research scientists with two i Q and aminutive bodies. And
then he goes on to say, we shall have the
(24:56):
power to produce races of morons or of mathematic savalants.
We shall also be able to breed babies with super
normal vision and hearing, and go on, he goes on
and on. He even goes on to say girls with
super memories and perhaps more or less than the two.
Oh wow, well there's some straight up total recall stuff
right there. Yeah. Indeed, so thankfully this is a concept
(25:20):
that either you can think you look at it too, uys,
either that's just not happening or happened, or it's going
to happen. But cloning, as we have seen, is something
that has fallen under you know, ethical guidelines and has
been restricted for a number of reasons. Yeah. I mean,
we've we've danced around with cloning, um when in terms
of animal cloning, but no one's really committed to the
(25:41):
full on human cloning effort as yet. There's just there's
just too many ethical and ultimately governmental and economic barriers
that that prevent us from from going there, and you know,
he also gets on the cloning. I could go on
and on, but there's there's one part two where he's
talking about that, where he says, quote, but clone could
also create undreamed of complications for the race. There's a
(26:04):
certain charm to the idea of Albert Einstein bequeathing copies
of himself to posterity. But what about of Hitler? Should
there be laws to regular like cloning? And of course
in this we get into this area where where he's
he's at least entertaining some of the more drastic and
uh and hyperbolic ideas about what cloning is the idea
(26:24):
that you could, oh, my goodness, they cloned Hitler. Now
we have five extra Hitlers in the world, and what
we're gonna do about it? Without realizing that even the
reverse of that cloning Albert Einstein. We've discussed in the
past what is genius, and genius is not just something
you can cook up in a pot. You know, there
are a number of factors that go into into into
what makes a great mind. Not only am I capable
(26:46):
of of of achieving of various things, but actually capable
of pulling them off as well? Yeah, there's this, Um,
remember this episode on This American Life, and it was
about a cow that had been cloned, and it was
just farmers over cow had a very distinct, very deep
relationship with this cow, right, and so yes, yes it's right.
(27:10):
And so the clone turns out to mean nothing like
this this other bowl that he had, and and it
completely disappoints him. And so on some level you have
to wonder, like there's been so much research in the
animal world in cloning that you know, perhaps we humans
have come to the conclusion that it's not really worth
it for us at this point. Um, things are not
(27:33):
going to turn out the way that we thought they would.
That that bowl, that human is not going to be
the person that you loved or the Marilyn Monroe that
the film industry wants to create again. Right, I mean,
if you clone Hitler, Hitler's clone might very well just
become a yoga teacher. You know, they're just too many
factors at play. There is like does this clone if
Hitler have have the exact same circumstances that will that
(27:54):
allow him to to reach this end point? Does do
they have the same levels of our the same levels
of power at their their fingertips to pull. They're just
so many factors there. Yeah. Now, in terms of where
the rubber meets the road here, we know that researchers
have used cloning to make human embryo for the purpose
of producing stump cells, so we know that we can
do that. But beyond that, it gets a little bit
(28:14):
tricky because cloning requires that researchers first remove the nucleus
of an egg cell, and then when that's done, they
also remove proteins that are essential to help cells divide.
Now and mice not a big problem, right, because essentially
they can replace those proteins, but they have found that
primates aren't able to do this, and as a result,
(28:35):
there's this molecular process known as imprinting. Um it does
not occur properly in cloned embryos, and they can it
can cause the fetus to spontaneously aboard or the animal
to die shortly afterward. So bear all that in mind,
along with the fact that there's like huge ethical implications
and it just doesn't seem that cloning is going to
(28:56):
be a thing. And in my thing too is that
And if cloning became a thing, I feel and you
would have to have a circumstance where again it made
sense and it was safe and uh and everything lined up.
But essentially you would get into it, into this scenario
where you would have children with only one parent, and
that's about as scary as it would be. It's not
a situation where oh, the Koch brothers uh clone themselves
(29:20):
and now they're Littlekoch brothers that are gonna inherit the
millions and they live forever and ever, you know, on
into infinity. No, they would just essentially be children, children
of a of a different genetic construction of you know,
essentially almost an a sexual construction. But they would still
be children, and they wouldn't be like the scary clone
army material or anything of that nature. Yeah, well, they
(29:42):
wouldn't have the genetic diversity. I d no, they wouldn't.
But but I feel like as children, as people, and
as a reproductive choice, I think we would we would
get used to it if it were happening. I don't
think there would be I don't think we'd have a
lot of future shock. If there was a book Susie
has one father, you know, no one parent. This would
(30:03):
be the title of the book. You know, you just explain. Oh, well,
Susie was created via cloning, so she only has one
genetic parents. Well, I mean that's the term of that test,
you babies, right, vitro fertilization. This is something that has
become the norm for us. Um. Now, another thing that
the topflers got wrong, um is economic growth. Okay. They
basically envisioned a future in which the growing global market
(30:26):
became more localized in the sense that there would be
decentralized production enacted by the consumer. Oh it's a little
like the I kea market, Right, you get the parts,
but then you put them together yourself. And they call
this pro sumption. When consumers do some are all of
the work of production. And they thought this would lead
to renewable energy working from the home and de urbanization. Yeah.
(30:50):
And it seemed like that the direction we were going
in again from the nineteen seventies, but that they were
based basing this on the idea and basic on what
the the the economist we're telling them that they quote
the problem of economic growth was licked that that all
they need to do is fine tune the system, and uh,
and we would just continue to see this exponential growth
(31:11):
along these lines. Yeah, and it would be more of
like an individual cottage system, right, and decentralized in that sense.
According to Richard Cotch, writing for Huffington Post in his
article for Things Talking got Wrong, their vision is correct
in the terms of self service, we've seen that, but
not in decentralizing the global market, he says, quote the
rise of self service supermarkets, gas stations, i kea budget, airlines, dell.
(31:35):
That's all been associated with the rise of new corporations
and a greater extension of the market as the cost
of goods and services fall. So yeah, self service fits
in there, but that only helps the companies to decrease
their bottom line. In other words, you can't stop the
marketplace there you go and where do you have markets
in the cities and the cities which they also thought
again this d organization would occur and that people would
(31:58):
move out of the cities and shift away from them.
But as the world market increases, as we know, so
as industries, because cities offer an infrastructure, they offer networking
opportunities and shared knowledge. Yeah, I mean that they really
got that one wrong, because obviously we've seen the tremendous
continued growth of urban areas and even even in an
(32:20):
age right now where technically, technically everyone in this office
could work from just about anywhere they wanted to, because
we can all work on our computers. You and I
are in the same room right now, But we could
conceivably do this from different corners of the country. Yeah,
we could skype it in, right, but but we don't,
because there are a number of additional benefits, uh for
(32:41):
business to be located in one place and to be
then and for that place to be uh in close
proximity to all these other resources. Yeah, it's you can't
necessarily have the wild West. You have to have that
structure in place, and that's what cities provide for sure. Now,
another idea that they put forth in Future Shock that
also has not really shaken out, um as they predicted
(33:03):
the idea that we would have a simplification of our
systems via powerful, powerful computers, sort of like the top
of himself. In interview with Wired, uh magazine says the
early assumptions were that the giant brain was going to
solve our problems for us, that it was going to
(33:24):
get all this information together, and that therefore life would
be simplified. What it overlooked was the fact that computers
also complexify reality. And of course this was a great
disappointment to the Soviets because they were going to centrally
plan their thing with a big computer. So this idea
that like a supercomputer is going to set in the
center of the city and then plan out how everything
(33:44):
works and make things easier is both. Uh. Yeah, there's
there's some truth to that. Computers do make things a
little more streamlined in places, but there's there's a certain
amount of complexity, both in terms of our systems that
in terms of our personal experience of reality. Yeah, if
I am remembering this correctly, we did an episode on
(34:05):
the Living Earth Simulator which tried to take it like
every data point in our existence, throw it in there
and try to predict how things we're gonna happen. So
we're talking about like weather, uh, socio economics, mean, traffic patterns, everything. Yeah,
Like they wanted to take various simulated models such as weather,
combine them all and have a complete or a complete
(34:27):
ish worldview of what the world is doing and to
simulate how these various various changes would affect other changes.
But as as weather points out to us on a
daily basis, it's not really that easy to predict what's
going to go on because there's sort of like that
butterfly effect, there's entropy in the background, and it's not
really in the background, it's just always working, honest, and
(34:49):
so we rely too heavily on routinization or trying to
predict things based off of patterns. One topic that instantly
came to mind when I was reading about this high
frequency algorithmic trading. Uh. This is of course on Wall Street.
We have computers that are doing the trading, which is
computers uh, don't have to operate at the human cognitive
(35:10):
um speed setting. You have these various transactions that are
happening almost you know, within the know, just fractions of
a second. Uh. And it's it's been very controversial, some
people champion claiming that it doesn't pose any kind of
systematic risk, that the so far so called micro crashes
that we've experienced starting anything to really get um upset about.
(35:31):
But then you have people like Nobel Prize winning economist
Michael Spence who thinks that there is a lot of
danger here and we should just ban it completely. So
again we have just the idea of letting the computers
come in and simplify something as complex and at times
chaotic as as economic trading. There that we see a
lot of division. Is it a good thing, is it
(35:52):
a bad thing? We're still feeling it out well. And
then in addition to that, we have so much data
coming in all streams from everywhere, every corner of the Earth,
from drones, from satellites, you name it. So you know,
you try to do something like the Living Earth simulator,
and who knows, maybe that will actually come to Fruition
and work one day in the way that it's meant to.
(36:14):
But for the most part, it's just trying to manage
that amount of data, right, I mean, there's so much
information on the web. I mean every day we're researching
topics and we're going on the web and finding these
various sources, and there's just so much of it. Like
the day I started here, uh some number of years
ago u nineteen hundreds, I was actually going to the library.
(36:38):
I remember checking out library books to work. And I
still pick up physical copies of books occasionally, but not
with the with the frequency that I was then because
now there's just so much more available. But still you
look at something like Wikipedia, which is UH, which which
is great. Don't get me wrong, But even in the
situation where you have all of this sort of communal
high think contributing to this vision of complete world knowledge,
(37:02):
they're still flaws in it. There's still omissions in it,
UH and UH, and that highlights some of it. The
problems with the idea of computers and UH and integrated
technology solving our our problems. Yeah, I'm being able to
come in and clean it all up and make it
tidy for us. Well, it turns out that we are
just a messy, messy people that can't be tidied. So
(37:23):
we are not picking on this book or the Tofflers
were just kind of saying that, Hey, in this incredible
book detailing what was going on in the seventies and
what might be going on in the future, there were
a couple of things that didn't come to fruition, and
they're they're interesting to look at in that way, like,
what are the things that they got wrong? In the
next episode, we're going to talk about what they got right.
(37:45):
And in some of the lingering like ramifications of what
the Topplers were trying to say in the seventies and
throughout the eighties and subsequent books. Okay, before we close out, though,
I do want to mention that the term future shock
has of course become a part out of our culture. Uh.
We still hear it to thrown around today, But in
the seventies you saw a lot of it. Like if
(38:06):
you do an IMDb search for future Shock, you'll see
various TV shows that would label an episode when and
so will be titled future Shock. You saw Tharg's Future Shocks,
which was a section of the long running British comic
two thousand a d in which various sci fi uh
sort of takes on future shock would be unveiled. Uh,
(38:26):
And most remarkable of all, James Brown hosted Future Shock
on TV UH from seventy six to seventy eight, and
it was shot right here in Atlanta, Georgia, as well
as in Augusta. Nice. I guess it was his home
place right, his birth his birth home. That's not the
correct term, but you know what I'm saying. Yeah, if
you do a YouTube search for Future Shock James Brown,
(38:48):
you will see some wonderful clips of this show, which
sadly is not as futuristic as I had hoped. That
basically it's soul Train with with just his Future Shock
in the background instead of soul Train. Um, it's it's
still one full. So some wonderful music on there, but
there are no dancing androids. I was hoping that like
big puffy outfits that were like reflective metal, metallic clicking, yeah,
(39:09):
and there would be like a lot of future shock
get old yeah lyrics about super industrialism and cloning. But yeah,
but it's an example of the word becoming a part
of our culture and just becoming this this idea that's
even if we forget what it means, it's still it's
still there in the background, all right, So definitely tune
into the next episode where we will discuss more on
(39:32):
the topic of future Shock. In the meantime, you want
to get in touch with us, you want to see
what we're talking about, what we're blogging about, what kind
of videos we've shot, what we're doing on social media.
We'll head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com. That is the place to go if you
want to remain up to date on what we're doing.
You know, because you go on Facebook, there's so much
stuff on there. You're getting information overload. You're gonna miss stuff.
(39:54):
You go to Twitter, you're gonna miss stuff. But if
you go to stuff and blow your Mind dot com,
it is there, and it's searchable, all of the podcast episodes,
all the blog posts, you name it um. And then
there's another way to get in touch with me. Yeah,
if you want to send us a direct data stream,
you can do that by sending an email at blow
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(40:16):
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