Future Shock

by Alvin Toffler

A case in point is the so-called OLIVER* that some computer experts are striving to develop to help us deal with decision overload. In its simplest form, OLIVER would merely be a personal computer programmed to provide the individual with information and to make minor decisions for him. At this level, it could store information about his friends’ preferences for Manhattans or martinis, data about traffic routes, the weather, stock prices, etc. The device could be set to remind him of his wife’s birthday—or to order flowers automatically. It could renew his magazine subscriptions, pay the rent on time, order razor blades and the like.

As computerized information systems ramify, moreover, it would tap into a worldwide pool of data stored in libraries, corporate files, hospitals, retail stores, banks, government agencies and universities. OLIVER would thus become a kind of universal question-answerer for him.

OLIVER would know how its owner would, in all likelihood, react to various suggestions made at a committee meeting. (Meetings could take place among groups of OLIVERs representing their respective owners, without the owners themselves being present. Indeed, some “computer-mediated” conferences of this type have already been held by the experimenters.)

Pushed to the extremes of science fiction, one can even imagine pin-size OLIVERs implanted in baby brains, and used, in combination with cloning, to create living—not just mechanical—alter egos.

we may, within the foreseeable future, be able to augment man’s intelligence and informational handling abilities. Research in biochemistry and nutrition indicate that protein, RNA and other manipulable properties are, in some still obscure way, correlated with memory and learning.

Should biochemical treatments be used to raise mental defectives to the level of normals, should they be used to raise the average, or should we concentrate on trying to breed super-geniuses?

Where these effects are likely to be seriously damaging, we must also be prepared to block the new technology. It is as simple as that Technology cannot be permitted to rampage through the society.

In the West, the basic criterion for filtering out certain technical innovations and applying others remains economic profitability. In communist countries, the ultimate tests have to do with whether the innovation will contribute to overall economic growth and national power. In the former, decisions are private and pluralistically decentralized. In the latter, they are public and tightly centralized.

Can one live in a society that is out of control? That is the question posed for us by the concept of future shock. For that is the situation we find ourselves in. If it were technology alone that had broken loose, our problems would be serious enough. The deadly fact is, however, that many other social processes have also begun to run free, oscillating wildly, resisting our best efforts to guide them.

The problem is not simply that we plan too little; we also plan too poorly. Part of the trouble can be traced to the very premises implicit in our planning.

Science first gave man a sense of mastery over his environment, and hence over the future. By making the future seem malleable, instead of immutable, it shattered the opiate religions that preached passivity and mysticism.

mounting evidence that society is out of control breeds disillusionment with science. In consequence, we witness a garish revival of mysticism. Suddenly astrology is the rage. Zen, yoga, seances, and witchcraft become popular pastimes.

When critics charge that technocratic planning is anti-human, in the sense that it neglects social, cultural and psychological values in its headlong rush to maximize economic gain, they are usually right. When they charge that it is shortsighted and undemocratic, they are usually right. When they charge it is inept, they are usually right.

Today we suffer for lack of utopian ideas around which to organize competing images of possible futures.

No vision—utopian or otherwise—energizes our efforts. No rationally integrated goals bring order to the chaos. And at the national and international levels, the absence of coherent policy is equally marked and doubly dangerous.

undemocratic elements in the New Left leap to the Marcusian conclusion that the masses are too bourgeoisified, too corrupted and addled by Madison Avenue to know what is good for them. And so, a revolutionary elite must establish a more humane and democratic future even if it means stuffing it down the throats of those who are too stupid to know their own interests. In short, the goals of society have to be set by an elite. Technocrat and anti-technocrat often turn out to be elitist brothers under the skin.

Democratic political forms arose in the West not because a few geniuses willed them into being or because man showed an “unquenchable instinct for freedom.” They arose because the historical pressure toward social differentiation and toward faster paced systems demanded sensitive social feedback.

As interdependency grows, smaller and smaller groups within society achieve greater and greater power for critical disruption. Moreover, as the rate of change speeds up, the length of time in which they can be ignored shrinks to near nothingness. Hence: “Freedom now!”

The encouraging fact is that we now have the potential for achieving tremendous breakthroughs in democratic decision-making if we make imaginative use of the new technologies, both “hard” and “soft,” that bear on the problem. Thus, advanced tele-communications mean that participants in a social future assembly need not literally meet in a single room, but might simply be hooked into a communications net that straddles the globe.