MiniReview: Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (1970)
It's been 50 years since this classic of futurology was published. NPR noted its 40th anniversary a decade ago.
This is a review-in-process, as I'm still reading the book -- presently on Chapter 9, the first of Part 3. There are six parts and 20 chapters in the full book.
General impressions:
- The parts addressing psychology of constant rapid change are good.
- The parts discussing specific emerging technologies, largely fail.
- The bits about specific cultural changes, a mixed bag. Numerous hit, but also many misses.
And I'm willing to venture some thoughts as to why.
Psychology is an information science, or more accurately, a branch of cybernetics. It concerns perceiving reality, processing it, matching it to known patterns, taking actions, and observing the results. And one common failure mode of cybernetic systems is responding to change too rapid to be assimilated, across these levels. Specifically: too much information to be able to perceive it all, too much information to process it all. Changes to ground truths such that known patterns no longer apply, and cannot be adapted quickly enough. In particular, the fact that discarding old patterns for new is expensive and slow, at both individual and group (organisational, societal) levels. And responses may be insufficient or ineffective.
The fundamental premise of Future Shock is change beyond the capacity for adaptation. And so it speaks well to these elements. As they're based on fundamental principles of cybernetics, even where neither Toffler nor his many sources and interview subjects seems directly aware of this, the principles hold up over time.
At the end of Chapter 8 is a particularly good section on the problem of the psychological limits of dealing with constant and ceaseless change:
Change, roaring through society, widens thee gap between what we believe and what really is, between the existing images and the reality they are supposed to reflect. When this gap is only moderate, we can cope more or elss rationally with change, we can react sanely to new conditions, we have a grip on reality. When this gap grows too wide, however, we find ourselves increadsingly unable to cope, we respond inappropriately, we become ineffectual, withdraw or simply panic. At the final extreme, when the gap grows too wide, we suffer psychosis --- or even death.
To maintain our adaptive balance, to keep the gap within manageable propoertions, we struggle to refresh our imagery, to keep it up-to-date, to relearn reality. Thus the accelerative thrust outside us finds a corresponding speed-up in the adapting individual. Our image-processing mechanisms, whatever they may be, are driven to operate at higher and higher speeds.
This has consequences that have been as yet largely overloooked. For when we classify an image, any image, we make a definite, perhaps even measurable, energy-investment in a specific organizational pattern in the brain. Learning requires energy; and relearing requires even more. "All the researches on learning," writes Harold D. Lasswell of Yale, "seem to confirm the view that 'energies' are bound in suport of past learning, and that new energies are essential to unbind the old..." At the neurological level, he continues, "Any established system appears to include exceedingly intricate arrangements of cell material, electrical charges and chemical elements. At any cross section in time ... the somatic structure represents a tremendous investment of fixed forms and potentials..." What this means in brief is very simple: there are costs involved in relearning --- or, in our terminology, reclassifying imagery.
In all the talk about the need for continuing education, in all the popular discussions of retraining, there is an assumption that man's potentials for re-education are unlimited. That is, at best, an assumption, not a fact, and it is an assumption that needs close and scientific scrutiny. The process of image formation and classification is, in the end, a physical process, dependent upon finite characteristics of nerve cells and body chemicals. In the nerual system as now constituded there are, in all likelihood, inherent limits to the amount and speed of image processing that the individual can accomplish. How fast and how continuously can the individual revise his inner images before he smashes up against these limits?
Nobody knows....
In Chapter 9, dealing with specific future emerging technologies, the situation is reversed: very little of what's predicted has come to pass 50 years on, with a few exceptions, and technologist of a half-century ago appear to have been grossly overoptimistic. This seems to be based on a few fundamental failings:
Advocates of specific technologies are almost always directly attached to them, whether as academics, military advocates, or through enterprise. They have a strong positivity bias, seeking to drum up enthusiasm, interest, and funding or capital.
Drawbacks or difficulties are minimised. Complexities, interactions, and challenges in development of proposed technologies are grossly underestimated, glossed over, or ignored. Since many of these are themselves emergent consequences, the fact that they are not apparent at the outset is somewhat understandable, though the persistent unwarranted optimism should itself serve as a cautionary note.
Social implications and resistances to technologies are consistently underestimated. What sounds interesting or promising within a lab or academic setting often takes on new, and ominous, dimensions when introduced to the real world. Lives, careers, and industries are disrupted. Sociopaths and dictators take up an interest in unanticipated (or unadvertised) capabilities and implications. Existing power centres are challenged. Even modest increases in complexity often prove massive obstacles to widespread adoption.
In his commentary on social changes, Toffler's been a mixed bag. He does take note of greatly liberalised standards on sexuality, greater equality of the genders (or most of them) as well as races (and not: that's "greater" not "pefect"), and of more diverse lifestyles generally. He misses much of the counterveiling force of increased conservativism and religiosity, especially within the US. And quite frequently he picks up short-lived fads as examples of long-term future trends, when they've long-since been forgotten. Though he points out that fads and rapid-cycling of social trends are increasing, he seems blind himself to which specific instances are examples of this and not.
There are two thirds of the book to go, and I suspect it will continue to have high- and low-lights. On balance, I'd say where Toffler does have insights, they're piercing, insightful, and useful. I've found myself repeatedly noting ideas I've recently stumbled across myself, of others I had no idea were so durable, and several which are novel. Even the failures are instructive --- they provide clues as to modalities of development and progress, and what paths are likely to have higher or lower resistance.
There are substantial notes (27 pages) and index (22), both well worth mining and inspecting.
I do suspect I'll be digging into the psychological elements further in future.