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