Hi, Anne Corbin, your Mind Body Spirit Mentor. I'm here with this week's episode of the mind body spirit connection. You are a complex being composed of 3 parts, mind, body, and spirit. Just get those 3 parts working together in harmony Anne upscale your life. I'm here to show you how. I've just been watching a rather interesting documentary, which was produced in 1972, basically about a book called Future Shock by Alvin Toffler, which was published in 1970.
And it's all about the so called premature arrival of the future, and it goes into detail about the sickness that descends on mankind as a result of too much change books that is probably in the same bracket as 1984 by George Orwell, and brave new world by Aldis Huxley. Anne the premise of the book and the film is that we, as a society, were unprepared for all this change that was coming so suddenly Anne its effects were devastating already back in the early 70s.
For example, from our home, we get a sense of security. We need it Anne we expect it, but the security was under attack by all the change in all its various forms that were affecting daily life. Creating conflict with the environment, the film referred to choice and over choice, and the pressure to keep up, keep up with the change, don't fall behind.
They re they described the society as plastic wrapped, and instant with no time to think about anything Anne no time to consider the choices that were being made over and over and over again on a daily basis. And it was this pressure that was causing the future shock. Don't fall behind. Keep up with the latest. Buy now. Buy more stuff. So technology feeds on knowledge. You might think that technology was quite undeveloped in 1970. Not so It was there. It just wasn't so much in our faces.
It was, and of course, still is expanding at a phenomenal rate. And this film was made almost before computers were part of daily life. The big companies had them, but this was at the time when a computer would take up an entire room, and they were huge, great noisy things. They needed air conditioning, and you had to be trained to use them, and the idea of a computer on every desk was absolutely years in the future.
At that time, apparently, a 1000 books were being published per day, which meant that figure equated to 30,000 books per month or 365,000 new books every year. Amazing. What happened to all of them, but it's more pressure pressure pressure from more information.
And even then, a pre particular professor was quoted, are saying he couldn't pass the exams that his students were passing because he would have to relearn a whole stack of information just to be sufficiently up to date to pass the exams that the next generation passing. He said 60% of his knowledge was already out of date. So This pressure existed even back in 1970. The pressure to swap old for new was growing. The concept of the trade in was becoming very popular.
Stuff, consumer goods, was built for obsolescence. So that people would not hang on to it indefinitely and expect it to last forever. Remember record players Anne records, of Corbin, we've got this issue now. VHS machines? Well, we don't use them anymore, we've moved on to upgraded equivalents. I mean, people don't even buy DVDs anymore. All this stuff was 50 years in the future.
Back then, I suspect tape cassettes, the portable tape cassettes were state of the art, and I remember I came to the UK on holiday in 1980, Anne Cliff Richard's song wired for Sound was very popular. And this was all about the Sony Walkman, which I had just been invented Anne all the kids had Anne. So that's 40 odd years ago, and the pressure to consume consume consume. Has been growing, growing, growing.
Even friendships were seen or sorry, were becoming disposable because society was becoming a lot more mobile. Costly building which would be erected Anne supposedly would last for, I don't know, 50 years, 60 years, 100 years, they were being hold down to make space for bigger buildings and bigger profits, I suppose, for those who were developing them. Society even then was becoming more transient.
Moving home for the sake of work was becoming very commonplace Anne this sense of impermanence was dieting, people were losing their sense of belongingness. Communities were being disrupted, Anne every time you move and try and get absorbed into a new environment, community, whatever, it gets little bit harder. So people were, getting accustomed to not knowing their neighbors because of lack of time.
Spending less time at home, more time out of the home, either in the place of work or commuting to the place of work. And this is all part of future shock. It's pressure. It's adapting, being forced to adapt Anne it's it's disquieting because humans are social animals. They like the warmth and the belongingness of the family or the community, or the club even. In in our DNA, and this encouragement to be, population of nomads has gradually being, filtered into our consciousness.
In fact, now the nomadic lifestyle is encouraged, the digital lifestyle. Anyway, that wasn't in the film because Oh, all our little pocket gadgets, they were still way in the future. They, they did exist in Star Trek, but that was pure science fiction back in those days, 1970. For young people, home was becoming the place that you left to prove that you were grown up. And all this freedom in its different forms came with a loss of sense of belonging.
And long term commitments were becoming something that the young just didn't comprehend. It was the very beginning of the concept of the portfolio career. Again, it's not a comfortable thing. People had been accustomed to their parent. It was usually one parent in those days, not both. Being in the same job for life. Alvin Toffler was a sociologist and a futurist he was possibly one of the earliest people to give himself that name.
Anne I've I have to say his view of the future was a bit dystopian. The the whole, the whole thrust of the film was, this is what's coming folks, and it's not particularly good news. It went into some depth about how relationships were changing, becoming more temporary, yes, as divorce had already become less of a disgrace, more acceptable, and then the different kinds of a acceptable relationships, not necessarily families as we were used to, but maybe half a dozen people living together.
Forget the term they used for that, Anne then they also had communes where maybe twenty people were living together, and I really mean living together, not just sharing the living space. Apparently, they liked the freedom to be able to spice it up like that. Death was being pushed further into the future.
People were having their lives extended, by electronic devices Anne plastic bots that term was used in the film, which amazed me, bioengineering was discussed as a concept Anne, of course, transplantation of, art Anne use of artificial organs. A facelift was described in brief detail, the before and after views were given. So I think all the the plastic surgery thing for Anne, must have just been coming into popular consciousness and availability around about the early 70s.
And the film also touched on the subject of artificial intelligence. Even in 1972, it wasn't an unknown concept. Particular British scientist had developed a little plastic, thing, which he described as a behavior machine, and it was like a cross between, a toy and, a plastic pet that could move around.
And one, it put me in mind of one of those little vacuum cleaners that buzzes around the floor on its own, and finds its way to the nooks and crannies and the places that need the dirt cleared away. He had been working on his behavior machine for some 20 years and was quite proud of it. The film moved on to discuss robots in more detail, the the big ones that looked like machines Anne would be useful on production lines. And then as the camera focused on a very human looking head.
Imagine one of those mannequins that you see shop window, but this had soft skin and hair, and it looked fairly life like. And this was what the voiceover had to say. Machines like this can see here, touch, and smell, they can solve problems that would normally require human intelligence. They respond to changes around them and act accordingly. We might Anne day duplicate man his form, his body, his actions Anne reactions carefully engineered for life like experience.
Back then, they hadn't got the brain parts sorted and the narrator carried on. The momentum has been established. Now the direction is up to us. Of course now, AI has way overtaken human intelligence and is seen by many as a threat. But back to 1972, the forecasts in the documentary were now becoming rather bleak, while still being interesting at the same time, first they showed a very life like female robot checking in passengers at an airport.
Well, that didn't happen because we all got trained to check ourselves in using machines, but, that's when we were allowed to travel, of course. Anne they showed babies who would now be in their fifties, commenting on how much change these little people would see in their lives. And of course, we never did get babies being looked after by robots.
It does still take person to person contact, but there came a discussion next on IVF It hadn't been done successfully on humans at this time, but they had been practicing successfully on animals. They were now debating the moral aspects of creating human beings, not just around parentage, but around the possibilities available for programming IQ. And to pre choose the sex, the color, the height, and so on, like ticking boxes on an order form I mean, this is eugenics.
And just because it's been controlled up to now, that is as far as we know, it doesn't mean that it isn't what Klaus Schwab and his cronies at the World Economic Forum would consider as the next logical step after a couple more Anne Demics. There was discussion of the breakdown of the family and breakdown of marriage, rise of group marriage up. I've mentioned that. I must have been ahead of myself. And other institutions, of course, are crumbling.
It showed demonstrations outside schools and said the system was under attack, but on 4 It gave no details, so I don't know what was in the producer's head there. They showed police on strike, and this kind of behavior had previously been unheard of in the 70s, and there were numerous marches by women for equal opportunities, demanding abortions, of course, and rejecting roles formally dictated by tradition. According to Toffler, these things were symptoms of society cracking under pressure.
Quote, what was private is now public? What was condemned is now striving for acceptance. Another quote, we are living through Anne of the greatest Revolution in history. The birth of a new civilization, collective protests, riots, Anne so forth shatter the structure of the old changes bombard our minds and bodies. We have become confused helpless, unable to cope. I wonder if this was when the word stress first came to the fore.
Apparently, a Soviet doctor in 1969 had predicted that they would soon have the ability to create geniuses Anne it was being postulated that a sort of arms race where the commodity was genetic engineering would soon develop. Where have you heard about genetic engineering recently? All in connection with vaccinations, right? But they were saying that it would soon be possible to change the memory process in humans using drugs and electrical stimulation, and they called this biotechnology.
And it was predicted that these things quick become addictive Anne people willingly would subject themselves to it because it felt so good. Anne, anybody, that term wasn't used in the film. So yes, they recognized upper and referred to awesome responsibility. They also recognized the potential for manipulation of DNA. Oh, yes. That's well upon us now.
And they talked briefly about the future possibility of duplicating living humans, in other words, clones And the last subject covered was cryonics, which is freezing people with terminal illnesses in the hope that they could be brought back to life in a future where knowledge was sufficiently advanced that the disease would be cured. But how would these resurrected people deal with the unrecognizable world that they were going to wake up in.
So the film finished with the narrator saying change is necessary, but changes out of control, he saw hope because he recognized or he said that younger folk were pushing back Anne, pointing out that their was choice available. And of course, that the choices we make determines the future of the world for year old film to the situation that we are facing today. So friends, that ups up the Mindbody Spirit Connection for this week. Let me know, please.
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