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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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 Posted: Thu Jun 30, 2016 7:12 am Post subject: Alvin Toffler is dead |
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NEW YORK — Alvin Toffler, a guru of the post-industrial age whose million-selling “Future Shock” and other books anticipated the disruptions and transformations brought about by the rise of digital technology, has died. He was 87.
He died late Monday in his sleep at his home in the Bel Air neighbourhood of Los Angeles, said Yvonne Merkel, a spokeswoman for his Reston, Virginia-based consulting firm, Toffler Associates.
One of the world’s most famous “futurists,” Toffler was far from alone in seeing the economy shift from manufacturing and mass production to a computerized and information-based model. But few were more effective at popularizing the concept, predicting the effects and assuring the public that the traumatic upheavals of modern times were part of a larger and more hopeful story.
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We actually read some of his essays(well, at least one) in high school Social Studies, such was his influence in the 1970s and 80s. I recall that he was considered pretty profound at one time, though years later, when Newt Gingrich became speaker and announced Toffler as one of his heroes, I read a political pundit who described his ideas as "the kind of stuff you come up with at a dinner party when you've had a few drinks and you're on a roll".
That probably wasn't a bad description of futurism in general, which, whatever it's potential, pretty much ended up as a repository of talking-points for magagement gurus doing the rubber-chicken curcuit.
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Fri Aug 05, 2016 1:57 pm Post subject: |
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The Futurists Were Wrong
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When the futurist Alvin Toffler died in June, it was not hard to predict that his legacy would rest on just one of his several books. Sure enough, The New York Times obituary identified him in the first sentence as the “celebrated author of Future Shock.” That bestseller, published in 1970, turned him into a guru on the topic of humanity’s destiny. Too bad the book was awful. Worse, its awfulness was part of a dubious record in the field of futurism that went back centuries.
Despite its title, Future Shock was mostly about the present, not the future. Toffler made clear that he thought the world was already undergoing an epic acceleration, declaring that “we are in the midst of the super-industrial revolution.” The price for this storm of change, he said, was “stress and disorientation” — hence the future shock. Having diagnosed the alleged ailment, Toffler then had the nerve to propose futurism as a treatment: “We need to train thousands of people in the perspectives and techniques of scientific futurism, inviting them to share in the exciting venture of mapping probable futures.” By that point, the book was starting to look like an intellectual racket.
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TorontoToronto
Joined: 20 Jun 2016
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| Posted: Mon Aug 08, 2016 4:28 am Post subject: |
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| A big miss a lot of futurists made in the 60s and 70s was how fast computer technology would evolve. Everyone seemed to think space travel and faster vehicles was the wave of the future. |
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Mon Aug 08, 2016 8:11 am Post subject: |
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| TorontoToronto wrote: |
| A big miss a lot of futurists made in the 60s and 70s was how fast computer technology would evolve. Everyone seemed to think space travel and faster vehicles was the wave of the future. |
And as I recall, pretty much nobody knew the internet was coming until it was actually here(early 90s). I remember books published in the mid- 70s, talking about how we'd have computers in our homes that could give us any information or photos we wanted. But all the data was supposed to be stored in the machine itself. |
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TorontoToronto
Joined: 20 Jun 2016
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| Posted: Mon Aug 08, 2016 9:01 am Post subject: |
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Vannevar Bush is credited with coming up with something "like" the Internet back in the late 1940s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex
Though it's cute how people like Bush thought of doing everything mechanically with pneumatic tubes etc.
I remember in the mid-1990s passing on a job with an Internet company because I feared it would be something of a fad. Oddly, I was earning some nice side money writing about the Internet for various publications. But now it's all about the net and mobile devices.
As I suggested on another thread about space exploration. I think we'll probably figure out ways to integrate our brain with computers and create virtual worlds so real, there's zero need to go find them with expensive space ships. We'll all be big fat blobs hooked up to IVs and computers and living in virtual worlds. |
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Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Mon Aug 08, 2016 2:57 pm Post subject: |
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| TorontoToronto wrote: |
As I suggested on another thread about space exploration. I think we'll probably figure out ways to integrate our brain with computers and create virtual worlds so real, there's zero need to go find them with expensive space ships. We'll all be big fat blobs hooked up to IVs and computers and living in virtual worlds. |
Besides, sending tiny probes to harvest information about other worlds makes a lot more sense than actually flying around "Star Trek Style." That's why the "Fermi Paradox" doesn't make any sense to me: manned interstellar travel would have little benefit for any species actually capable of it, so why would one ever expect to meet aliens? Any interstellar craft they send would likely be designed on as small a scale as possible for maximum efficiency, and be automated for maximum safety. Place your main craft behind the moon, a tiny relay probe to the side of it, then send down investigative probes the size of insects, and you could learn an immense amount about Earth while never being seen. And even if your civilization really was pushed into travelling to another star -- for example, because of problems with one's own home star -- choosing a system which one knew to be uninhabited as a target would make more sense.
But why fat? If one can pursue one's hedonistic urges in virtual reality, there's no need to gorge oneself to the point of obesity in reality. I would guess a population which "lived" in virtual reality would remain quite slim. |
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TorontoToronto
Joined: 20 Jun 2016
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| Posted: Tue Aug 09, 2016 4:51 am Post subject: |
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You're right. Probably not fat. Just soft.
Most of our consumption is consumption for the sake of more consumption. A car to get to work. A whole infrastructure just to get us to movie theaters and malls. If all or most of our desires and needs can be met by a simulation, our resource consumption would be minimal. I look at youth today. In my day, the dream purchase at age 16 was a car. It seems kids today want a better cell phone. In my day, the only way to get out meet friends and promenade before potential sex partners was a car. But you can do that with a swipe now. A phone takes fewer resources to build than a car.
I started my career long before "teleconferencing". I saw many really bletcherous implementations. A flight out to an office in Montreal or Calgary was still preferred to trying to get that damn thing to work. But today, I don't even think twice about having meetings over skype or facetime. My own job, I can work at home most days of the week.
I'm sure we'll see greater development in terms of people staying put and having their desires and needs met in a virtual fashion. |
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