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