Future Shock: Part I

like a silent stream, you know, clutching my face. And then I'm just just crawl into a into a corner of the martat station and I just hold myself for about fifteen twenty minutes until someone comes. Then came in an administered medication to me, to to to wake me back up and get me back in my body and move me again. Yeah. Classic case of RS replicant shock. Yeah, yeah, a s upset, a future shock, future shocked. Yeah, it's a It's a wonderful concept and at heart it deals

with change, with the rate of change in our world. Um, you know, generation after generation, we we of course clan to illusions of consistency of continuity, as we discussed in a recent episode, but we're always in the state of constant change. Our society is, our bodies are, our science or art, our values or technology. Everything is really in the state of flux. But we end up sort of clinging. I think to these these illusions that that there's a

set way that things should be. You know, well, I think because change illustrates to us that time is ephemeral, it's passing, and change is a real marker, right It's saying, essentially, hey, guess what You're gonna die one day, and that's a bummer. Nobody wants that. And we've talked about this before in

terms of normalcy bias. You know, even though we know it changes on the horizon or there's something that we need to re act to, a lot of us just kind of go back to the baseline and like to assume that everything is going to remain the same, even though we have evidence swirling around us all the time

that changes happening. It's interesting. I think back to when I was a kid trying to imagine what I would be like as an adult, and it's this kind of weird mix of ideas because obviously there were plenty of sci fi ideas around me, and sci fi ideas about what the future might might consist of, and so to a certain extent, I might have imagined myself going into space or that maybe being in the cards, you know.

But still my idea of my immediate future self and my immediate surroundings was very much based in my present of the time, without you know, without wow giving it a lot of thought. But it was kind of like the default setting, and we base our assumptions on the

most readily available model. I think that's because there's so much routinization in our lives that it gives us this false sense of continuity, and we're doing the same thing over day in and day out, and so you get the sense that there maybe maybe there is a stasis. But also some of it is just rooted and past thinking, past structures and audiologies, um. And I was thinking about

this the other day. We are at a point in history technologically at least, where we can actually look back in the universe past and understand that the universe has always been changing and there's a constant rate of change, uh in effect, and we look at this just in terms of something like the cosmic background radiation that we can measure and we can say, oh, you know, after the Big Bang, it wasn't just you know, you know,

this void. There was always something that was going on, and there were a great many changes that were only now beginning to completely um understand in this coherent way that the physical world is about entropy. Yeah. I mean, you look back at older our k given primitive views of the universe, and not all of them, but a lot of them were exceedingly human centric. They time began with humans, and if it ended, it ends with humans.

And our modern understanding is, of course that we're just this blip on the on the cosmic timeline, and there are things that have existed before, things that will exist afterwards. Like we're essentially we're like beta max in the technological timeline, you know. And at the time, it seems like we're the most important. It seems like we're we're the thing. But VHS is just around the corner, uh, compact us just around the corner, the Blu ray digital, all of

it's coming well. And it's interesting that you say that you you point to technology as a way to begin to mark the passing of time. And if you look at Moore's law, um, this is something that is the idea that computing power doubles every two years, which brings more and more features and greater rates of change in terms of our technology. But Moore's law isn't just a law, it's it's a it's ah, this very real idea that is playing out that the juggernaut of technology is real,

if not in our minds. And so we begin to see More's law at play in all sectors of our lives, things seeming to speed up. Yeah, innovation feeds back on the innovation of computing. Processes just become more and more complicated and more and more powerful, and eventually, hypothetically we reach that point where computer aies reach and surpass human cognitive power. Uh, the technological singularity. That's right, when when computers just kick us to the curb because they're like, wow,

really that's all you guys got. But in the meantime, computers have also created just an intense amount of data, and some would say that data would then give us so much information to make choices about that we would be in a state of over choice or information overload. And we owe this term as well as a number of terms we're gonna talk about here in the podcast, and the overall theme of Future Shock to Alvin and

Heidi Toffler, authors of the Future Shock. Yes, Howdie Toddler is an unacknowledged co author, but of course later on after publication she became known as the person who also influenced this book quite a deal. But in Future Shock, they write, if over stimulation at the sensory level increases the distortion with which we perceive reality, cognitive over stimulation

interferes with our ability to think. This was the first time people had said, hey, look, let's take a big view of what's going on, what's happened in the past, what's happening in the present, in the future, and see this rate of change and how it's affecting us. What I love about Future Shock is that it is prophetic in places, its hyperbolic in places. Uh, there's stuff that holds up, there's stuff that doesn't hold up. We're gonna

talk about all of that in this podcast. But in it's in what it gets right and in what it gets wrong. It's it stands as this, uh, this this potent exat ample of of how we've come to view the future and and also you know, our fear of the future, our fear of change and uh. And I feel like anytime we're we're contemplating our fears, including the fear of the future, the fear of change, the fear of impermanence, you have to have a certain about amount

of overreaction built into the model. You know. It's kind of like, uh, the idea of of monsters as symbols, and they symbolize things about ourselves in our lives, and they often have to be outrageous examples to drive home something that is less frightening at times. Well, I think it's not so much frightening to us anymore because a lot of the concepts that are covered in this nineteen one book are kind of old hat for us now. But at the time it must have been just terrifying

to people. And I think that that is borne out in the numbers, because if you look at this book of something like six million copies worldwide, in the first year, there were fifteen printings of this book and it's shot up on the best seller lists. So people had very real reaction to this idea. Because I think this is probably the first time that that people had really stepped back in this way and presented all of the information and all the change that was on the horizon based

on the evidence at that time. And UM, now if you look at this era of the nineteen seventies, this is an important era because there's so much stuff going on here. I mean, you have the whole peace and love thing which is disintegrating. Um, You're seeing a lot more strife, economic imbalance, violence. Um. The culture of the seventies is it's just itself very interesting. Yeah, I mean, just think about some of the things we have going

on during this era. We have all the psychedelic drugs, we have Vietnam, we have rock and Roll still going strong, we have oh yeah between two man was visiting the moon and uh, and it seemed like we would continue to maybe do that the in the following decades. You have the birth of modern computing, the world's first general microprocessor, the Intel four thousand and four, which came out the

in seventy one. You have fiber optics, you have microwave ovens, so you have a lot of big changes that are occurring. You have birth control, birth control, a lot of this is huge. And then the sort of base stock of all of this. I think of it this way, is

that science fiction has been in full bloom since the fifties. Right. Um, you have Philip K. Dicks do Androids, dream of Electric Sheep, Right, so you have all these ideas swirling around on how humanity is changing and how it could potentially change in

the future. Yeah, and I think you know, in the in the previous decades, you saw plenty of these like short films like The Kitchen of Tomorrow, you know, and these ideas of how technology was gonna affect the way we live, but they seemed a little a little further off in the future. But by the seventies were really

really seeing things begin to integrate around us. And it's sort of like that that day when you realize that some life event or some work uh deadline that had been approaching is now here and you realize, Wow, the future is here, in a in a in a way, in a shape that I'm not quite ready for. Yeah. And um, you know, before, like you said, in the nineties, it was all kind of shiny and new and you know, futurist.

And look, this product is going to make your life so much easier and then you fast forward to the seventies and there's a lot of different fracturing going on

in society. And so Alvin Toffler, who at times has been a student, radical, a welder, a newspaper reporter, and Fortune editor um, he and his wife Heidi decided to try to describe the psychological state for individuals and societies who hold this perception that there's too much change into short of a time period, and that there's no acknowledgement that there's this enormous structure all change going on, and that we're transitioning. This is really important from an industrial

society to what they call a super industrial society. Now, the one criterion for for for UM trying to figure out what is super industrial side as opposed to industrial society is that there's more laborers and post industrial businesses

than in agriculture based businesses. And of course we do see this, we see this flip a lot of people going to post industrial um types of companies during this time, right, So that example I gave at the beginning of the episode about just sort of shutting down psychologically mar On Marta, when you see an android or something that is in a kind of handy way. The essence of future shock the future doesn't always all the interpretations don't necessarily involve

like complete physical shutting down or madness. It's not future madness per se. But we're talking about the perceived premature arrival of the future. We're talking about the shock of rapid change. We're talking about too much change in too short of time. And it's important to note that all of these things, it's going to depend on who's viewing the present and who and what their idea of the future is. It's gonna vary from case to case, right,

what's your perception of change in the world. For instance, in a Wired article by Jason Kingdom, he referred to quote Van Winkle syndrome, which is sort of a take on future shock. And this is the idea that you feel amazed and bamboozled on stumbling over an innovation that you've failed to notice before. So you know, it's easy you can have something like future shock based on something that is actually not new at all. You just you

did weren't aware of. And if you have a hyper awareness of what is going on in the tech, the tech industries and and in in culture, then you're maybe not gonna be shocked by by the next h you know, bit on the local news about what the youth are doing. Now. One of the reasons why we really wanted to cover this topic in this book is because, um, and some ways we feel this way today, right, we feel like

we are completely inundated with data. We are um you know sometimes uh met with a lot of anxiety and paralysis about all the choices before us. So the reason that Future Shock is so interesting the book is because it is a very thoughtful treatment of this topic. And some of the stuff is still relevant today and some of it, um, you know, the Toppler's got wrong, and we'll discuss what they got right and what they got wrong.

But at the heart of it is this idea of trying to um understand how these abstract and concrete systems are working together on the human being. And this was something that was that was captured in a documentary in nineteen two. It doesn't quite I don't think it quite gives justice to the book, because I think it plays more on the sort of alarmist, the Cassandra elements of

the book. Because I really actually feel like the book is presented in a in a kind of calm manner and just saying, well, these are the things that are going on right now. Um, but it does have this sort of reefer madness flavor to it that I really love. Yeah, the book is is absolutely wonderful and and and it is still in print. You can still get a copy of it. I highly recommend anyone who's interested to pick

it up. I mean you do have to put yourself in the mindset a little bit and realize that this is a voice of the nineteen seventies speaking to the people of the nineteen seventies. For instance, that he uses the term ropot here a robot here, Yeah, who works

on artificial intelligence. So there's some very quaint terms in there. Well, he's also coining a lot of terms too, So um, there are there are a lot of words that he's rolling out that that I later realized, oh, well he invented That's he's the first person who is actually talking about this particular com Hetty Toddler actually is the person who um created the aphorism that the only thing that says the same as change. Um. Yes, but but if you if you can't get ahold of the book, or

you're not sure you want to do. Check out the documentary. It's been in its entirety on YouTube for like almost ten years now, so it's I'm pretty sure you'll be able to find it. But they made the documentary in seventy two. It is narrated by Orson Wells, the great Orson Wells Um who was also great in Size and Uh and you think maybe a little bit intoxicated. He seems a little intoxicated. And in the clips that I saw and he's kind of a turtleneck wearing cigar puffing.

He It opens with him on a airport moving walkway. He's kind of lumbering down that. Oh yeah, And that's after our fantastic intro where there's a couple walking towards the camera in a park setting. We can't quite see their face because the gleam of the sun, and then when they get closer, the blur moves out, the glare

goes away, and we see that their robots. And there's this wonderful music because, as it turns out, um the musician gil Melli did the music for the Future Shock short film, and this is the same artist responsible for the soundtrack for the film The Andromeda Strain as well as Night Gallery the classic Rod Serling. So that's why it has that refrimendous sense to it, like that wonderful, ominous music with a little jazz, but also some some

wonderful synthesizer effects going on. So even if you're just a fan of crazy cool voiceovers and and weird seventies uh, you know, the weird seventies look and feel of things, than Future Shock, the documentary is definitely worth checking out. Yeah, it's great. Orson Well says, in the course of my work, which has taken me to just about every corner of the globe, I see many aspects of a phenomenon which I am just beginning to understand. Our modern technologies have

changed the degree of sophistication beyond our wildest dreams. But this technology has exacted a pretty heavy price. We live in an age of anxiety and time of stress, and with all of our sophistication, we are in fact the victims of our own technological strength. We are the victims of shock. Future shocked. Nice, that's not really well, but you know, you get yeah, but you definitely get a sense of it because there's a there's a gravity to everything.

He's saying, and there there's a there's a fear that the film really does turn the dial up on the fear factor of future shock and and at times it's it's hammy and hilarious and and and I love it, like when he's talking about an artificial elbow being quote one more step towards an artificial man, which yes, technically, Like there's a whole scene there where they talk about about that some of the health topics, and they show an individual whose life was saved by I can't remember

his artificial heart, art artificial heart valve or some sort of device, but they managed to make it seem a little scary and you have to step outside of me, like, wait, this technology saved this guy's life, while are you trying to convince me to be afraid of this? And and that it's just a slippery slope to androids because it's Toppler in the brings us up sort of obliquely like at what point, and we've talked about this before, like

at what point are you augmenting ourselves and becoming transhuman now? Again, Toughler just sort of puts that out there in the book. Um, and it's not as if he's saying that if you have a pacemaker, you are all of a sudden not human. But he's bringing up the question of what direction are

we moving? Yeah. One of the important things to keep in mind about Future Shock is that, even though it's it's fun to focus on some of these uh sort of you know, fear of the youth, fear of the technology aspects, so much of it is about, first of all, how is this technology affecting me in my perception of the world, my ability to work with the world, But also how our advances in technology, how are changes in society and culture, how are they affecting systems that are

already in place in the world. Um. One one particular aspect that is not mentioned in the book that instantly comes to mind here is, of course, when you see uh say uh, the Internet arriving and that being ahead of various UH industries and systems, such as how a napster affected the music industry, where music sharing in our ability to digitally use music was way ahead of the industry's ability to regulate it or or may make money off of it and even understand it, and so a

certain amount of chaos erupted out of that and we still do a certain extent are are are dealing with the after effects of that. Yeah, and actually Toddlers, they would say that right now that there's not the infrastructure that's needed still that we intellectually intellectually property rights are just one example of how, you know, the law has not really kept up with what's going on on a

technological level. And we'll talk more about that and some of their ideas about how we are still lagging behind in those departments. But let's talk about some of the themes covered in this book before we talk about what the Toddlers got wrong. And we are talking about twenty chapters with main themes and then about a hundred and eight sub topics. So really the Toddlers took a massive introspective look into what was going on and really tried to cover all of the ground that they could. And

that's why it's such an amazing book. Yeah, it's one of those books. You know, sometimes you read really important works and you think I could have written that. But Future Shock is one of those books that I look at and I'm just in awe and how thorough it is.

Because some of some of the topics that they cover here include UM over choice, pressure to keep up with the latest technology, rapidly expanding knowledge, information overload, computer field society, temporary consumer culture, UM, youth movements, new transient lifestyles, instant intimacy, cyborgs, modular bodies, cybernetics, plastic surgery, UM, as well as robotics, changing the definition of man, artificial insemination, test two babies,

changing families, group marriages, communes, pornography, UH, general unrest, genetics, genetic arm races, genetic engineering, mind and body control, cloning. UM. It just see it just it just changes and changes and changes at every level of of our existence, every

level of our current nineteen seventies world. Yeah, and it's it's really interesting the way that he approaches them because something like um, the artificial elbow, you know that that might lead to the cyborgs among us, which is actually a chapter title. UM. He's basing that on what he sees as modularism in architecture, because he's seeing this in other sectors of industry, like you have this push toward trying to make things compact, trying to make things so

that they can be transported and changed up. And he's beginning to see in robotics, the infancy of this where the same sort of thing is happening with the human body in terms of trying to replace parts or make them more adaptable. And that's what's so interesting about it. Just the way that he's coming at this, or I should say he and his wife, Heidi Toffler coming at this, is that they're really basing that on the sort of things that they are seeing. And it's not just in robotics,

but you know, spreading out through society. And I just wanted to read this one little bit that Toffler says about unrest and young people. And he talks a lot about young people. It's really interesting. I mean, we have to because it's it kind of goes back to Yates Byzantium. Uh that no country for old men. We've always been afraid of what the young people are doing and what changes they're going to bring to our world. Yeah, but it's the youth culture and and one I think one

of the chapters two is like the youth ghetto. But he says it is clear that many of our young people, products of television and instant access to oceans of information, also become precocious intellectually but what happens to emotional development as the ratio of vicarious experience to real experience rises. Does the step up of vicariousness contribute to emotional maturity or does it in fact retard it? This is these are the same sort of conversations that we're having today, Exactly.

I think about that every time I used tumbler, because a lot of a lot of young people used tumbler as well as myself. So yeah, and we'll get more into that, but let's take a quick break and when we get back, we'll talk about what futures talk the

book got wrong. All right, we're back. You know you mentioned some movies of the future, and in reading future Chalk, I couldn't help but think a blade Runner and replicants because the Toffler's touch on this this idea that one day we could have clones or we could have robots

of ourselves, and we wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Yes, So the idea that I think the example is that you go to the store and there's a young woman behind the register, and you have to have that moment we try and figure out is she a real person or is she a computer? Is she a machine of some sort, and Topfler, of course suggests she might be both that the answer could be a little calm, a little calm beat huh. And then he's got an asterisk next to that. And if you follow that asterix, it

actually says I'm paraphrasing. But by the way, this kind of brings up, you know, sexual ethics between men and machine, and we probably should figure that out one day. Although thankfully he doesn't go deeply into that topic, or maybe too bad he doesn't. I mean, indeed, that's a whole topic right there. I think we've touched on that a time or two in turn. And when we, you know, to discussed human robot interactions and the idea of love

machines for lack of a better term. Yes, now, um, In terms of cloning or creating super races, the book says we are hurtling towards the time and we will be able to breed both super and sub races. As Theodore Jay Gordon put it, in the future, given the ability to taylor the race, I wonder if we would create all men equal, or would we choose to manufacture apartheid. Might the races of the future be a superior group, the DNA controllers, the humble servants, special athletes for the games,

research scientists with two i Q and aminutive bodies. And then he goes on to say, we shall have the power to produce races of morons or of mathematic savalants. We shall also be able to breed babies with super normal vision and hearing, and go on, he goes on and on. He even goes on to say girls with super memories and perhaps more or less than the two. Oh wow, well there's some straight up total recall stuff

right there. Yeah. Indeed, so thankfully this is a concept that either you can think you look at it too, uys, either that's just not happening or happened, or it's going to happen. But cloning, as we have seen, is something that has fallen under you know, ethical guidelines and has been restricted for a number of reasons. Yeah. I mean, we've we've danced around with cloning, um when in terms of animal cloning, but no one's really committed to the

full on human cloning effort as yet. There's just there's just too many ethical and ultimately governmental and economic barriers that that prevent us from from going there, and you know, he also gets on the cloning. I could go on and on, but there's there's one part two where he's talking about that, where he says, quote, but clone could also create undreamed of complications for the race. There's a certain charm to the idea of Albert Einstein bequeathing copies

of himself to posterity. But what about of Hitler? Should there be laws to regular like cloning? And of course in this we get into this area where where he's he's at least entertaining some of the more drastic and uh and hyperbolic ideas about what cloning is the idea that you could, oh, my goodness, they cloned Hitler. Now we have five extra Hitlers in the world, and what we're gonna do about it? Without realizing that even the

reverse of that cloning Albert Einstein. We've discussed in the past what is genius, and genius is not just something you can cook up in a pot. You know, there are a number of factors that go into into into what makes a great mind. Not only am I capable of of of achieving of various things, but actually capable

of pulling them off as well? Yeah, there's this, Um, remember this episode on This American Life, and it was about a cow that had been cloned, and it was just farmers over cow had a very distinct, very deep relationship with this cow, right, and so yes, yes it's right. And so the clone turns out to mean nothing like this this other bowl that he had, and and it

completely disappoints him. And so on some level you have to wonder, like there's been so much research in the animal world in cloning that you know, perhaps we humans have come to the conclusion that it's not really worth it for us at this point. Um, things are not going to turn out the way that we thought they would. That that bowl, that human is not going to be the person that you loved or the Marilyn Monroe that

the film industry wants to create again. Right, I mean, if you clone Hitler, Hitler's clone might very well just become a yoga teacher. You know, they're just too many factors at play. There is like does this clone if Hitler have have the exact same circumstances that will that allow him to to reach this end point? Does do they have the same levels of our the same levels of power at their their fingertips to pull. They're just

so many factors there. Yeah. Now, in terms of where the rubber meets the road here, we know that researchers have used cloning to make human embryo for the purpose of producing stump cells, so we know that we can do that. But beyond that, it gets a little bit tricky because cloning requires that researchers first remove the nucleus of an egg cell, and then when that's done, they also remove proteins that are essential to help cells divide.

Now and mice not a big problem, right, because essentially they can replace those proteins, but they have found that primates aren't able to do this, and as a result, there's this molecular process known as imprinting. Um it does not occur properly in cloned embryos, and they can it can cause the fetus to spontaneously aboard or the animal

to die shortly afterward. So bear all that in mind, along with the fact that there's like huge ethical implications and it just doesn't seem that cloning is going to be a thing. And in my thing too is that And if cloning became a thing, I feel and you would have to have a circumstance where again it made sense and it was safe and uh and everything lined up. But essentially you would get into it, into this scenario where you would have children with only one parent, and

that's about as scary as it would be. It's not a situation where oh, the Koch brothers uh clone themselves and now they're Littlekoch brothers that are gonna inherit the millions and they live forever and ever, you know, on into infinity. No, they would just essentially be children, children of a of a different genetic construction of you know, essentially almost an a sexual construction. But they would still be children, and they wouldn't be like the scary clone

army material or anything of that nature. Yeah, well, they wouldn't have the genetic diversity. I d no, they wouldn't. But but I feel like as children, as people, and as a reproductive choice, I think we would we would get used to it if it were happening. I don't think there would be I don't think we'd have a lot of future shock. If there was a book Susie has one father, you know, no one parent. This would

be the title of the book. You know, you just explain. Oh, well, Susie was created via cloning, so she only has one genetic parents. Well, I mean that's the term of that test, you babies, right, vitro fertilization. This is something that has become the norm for us. Um. Now, another thing that the topflers got wrong, um is economic growth. Okay. They basically envisioned a future in which the growing global market became more localized in the sense that there would be

decentralized production enacted by the consumer. Oh it's a little like the I kea market, Right, you get the parts, but then you put them together yourself. And they call this pro sumption. When consumers do some are all of the work of production. And they thought this would lead to renewable energy working from the home and de urbanization. Yeah.

And it seemed like that the direction we were going in again from the nineteen seventies, but that they were based basing this on the idea and basic on what the the the economist we're telling them that they quote the problem of economic growth was licked that that all they need to do is fine tune the system, and uh, and we would just continue to see this exponential growth along these lines. Yeah, and it would be more of like an individual cottage system, right, and decentralized in that sense.

According to Richard Cotch, writing for Huffington Post in his article for Things Talking got Wrong, their vision is correct in the terms of self service, we've seen that, but not in decentralizing the global market, he says, quote the rise of self service supermarkets, gas stations, i kea budget, airlines, dell. That's all been associated with the rise of new corporations and a greater extension of the market as the cost

of goods and services fall. So yeah, self service fits in there, but that only helps the companies to decrease their bottom line. In other words, you can't stop the marketplace there you go and where do you have markets in the cities and the cities which they also thought again this d organization would occur and that people would move out of the cities and shift away from them.

But as the world market increases, as we know, so as industries, because cities offer an infrastructure, they offer networking opportunities and shared knowledge. Yeah, I mean that they really got that one wrong, because obviously we've seen the tremendous continued growth of urban areas and even even in an age right now where technically, technically everyone in this office could work from just about anywhere they wanted to, because

we can all work on our computers. You and I are in the same room right now, But we could conceivably do this from different corners of the country. Yeah, we could skype it in, right, but but we don't, because there are a number of additional benefits, uh for business to be located in one place and to be then and for that place to be uh in close proximity to all these other resources. Yeah, it's you can't necessarily have the wild West. You have to have that

structure in place, and that's what cities provide for sure. Now, another idea that they put forth in Future Shock that also has not really shaken out, um as they predicted the idea that we would have a simplification of our systems via powerful, powerful computers, sort of like the top

of himself. In interview with Wired, uh magazine says the early assumptions were that the giant brain was going to solve our problems for us, that it was going to get all this information together, and that therefore life would be simplified. What it overlooked was the fact that computers also complexify reality. And of course this was a great disappointment to the Soviets because they were going to centrally

plan their thing with a big computer. So this idea that like a supercomputer is going to set in the center of the city and then plan out how everything works and make things easier is both. Uh. Yeah, there's there's some truth to that. Computers do make things a little more streamlined in places, but there's there's a certain amount of complexity, both in terms of our systems that

in terms of our personal experience of reality. Yeah, if I am remembering this correctly, we did an episode on the Living Earth Simulator which tried to take it like every data point in our existence, throw it in there and try to predict how things we're gonna happen. So

we're talking about like weather, uh, socio economics, mean, traffic patterns, everything. Yeah, Like they wanted to take various simulated models such as weather, combine them all and have a complete or a complete ish worldview of what the world is doing and to simulate how these various various changes would affect other changes.

But as as weather points out to us on a daily basis, it's not really that easy to predict what's going to go on because there's sort of like that butterfly effect, there's entropy in the background, and it's not really in the background, it's just always working, honest, and so we rely too heavily on routinization or trying to predict things based off of patterns. One topic that instantly came to mind when I was reading about this high

frequency algorithmic trading. Uh. This is of course on Wall Street. We have computers that are doing the trading, which is computers uh, don't have to operate at the human cognitive um speed setting. You have these various transactions that are happening almost you know, within the know, just fractions of

a second. Uh. And it's it's been very controversial, some people champion claiming that it doesn't pose any kind of systematic risk, that the so far so called micro crashes that we've experienced starting anything to really get um upset about. But then you have people like Nobel Prize winning economist Michael Spence who thinks that there is a lot of

danger here and we should just ban it completely. So again we have just the idea of letting the computers come in and simplify something as complex and at times chaotic as as economic trading. There that we see a lot of division. Is it a good thing, is it a bad thing? We're still feeling it out well. And then in addition to that, we have so much data coming in all streams from everywhere, every corner of the Earth,

from drones, from satellites, you name it. So you know, you try to do something like the Living Earth simulator, and who knows, maybe that will actually come to Fruition and work one day in the way that it's meant to. But for the most part, it's just trying to manage that amount of data, right, I mean, there's so much information on the web. I mean every day we're researching topics and we're going on the web and finding these

various sources, and there's just so much of it. Like the day I started here, uh some number of years ago u nineteen hundreds, I was actually going to the library. I remember checking out library books to work. And I still pick up physical copies of books occasionally, but not with the with the frequency that I was then because now there's just so much more available. But still you look at something like Wikipedia, which is UH, which which

is great. Don't get me wrong, But even in the situation where you have all of this sort of communal high think contributing to this vision of complete world knowledge, they're still flaws in it. There's still omissions in it, UH and UH, and that highlights some of it. The problems with the idea of computers and UH and integrated technology solving our our problems. Yeah, I'm being able to come in and clean it all up and make it tidy for us. Well, it turns out that we are

just a messy, messy people that can't be tidied. So we are not picking on this book or the Tofflers were just kind of saying that, Hey, in this incredible book detailing what was going on in the seventies and what might be going on in the future, there were a couple of things that didn't come to fruition, and they're they're interesting to look at in that way, like, what are the things that they got wrong? In the next episode, we're going to talk about what they got right.

And in some of the lingering like ramifications of what the Topplers were trying to say in the seventies and throughout the eighties and subsequent books. Okay, before we close out, though, I do want to mention that the term future shock has of course become a part out of our culture. Uh. We still hear it to thrown around today, But in the seventies you saw a lot of it. Like if you do an IMDb search for future Shock, you'll see various TV shows that would label an episode when and

so will be titled future Shock. You saw Tharg's Future Shocks, which was a section of the long running British comic two thousand a d in which various sci fi uh sort of takes on future shock would be unveiled. Uh, And most remarkable of all, James Brown hosted Future Shock on TV UH from seventy six to seventy eight, and it was shot right here in Atlanta, Georgia, as well as in Augusta. Nice. I guess it was his home place right, his birth his birth home. That's not the

correct term, but you know what I'm saying. Yeah, if you do a YouTube search for Future Shock James Brown, you will see some wonderful clips of this show, which sadly is not as futuristic as I had hoped. That basically it's soul Train with with just his Future Shock in the background instead of soul Train. Um, it's it's still one full. So some wonderful music on there, but

there are no dancing androids. I was hoping that like big puffy outfits that were like reflective metal, metallic clicking, yeah, and there would be like a lot of future shock

get old yeah lyrics about super industrialism and cloning. But yeah, but it's an example of the word becoming a part of our culture and just becoming this this idea that's even if we forget what it means, it's still it's still there in the background, all right, So definitely tune into the next episode where we will discuss more on

the topic of future Shock. In the meantime, you want to get in touch with us, you want to see what we're talking about, what we're blogging about, what kind of videos we've shot, what we're doing on social media. We'll head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That is the place to go if you want to remain up to date on what we're doing. You know, because you go on Facebook, there's so much stuff on there. You're getting information overload. You're gonna miss stuff.

You go to Twitter, you're gonna miss stuff. But if you go to stuff and blow your Mind dot com, it is there, and it's searchable, all of the podcast episodes, all the blog posts, you name it um. And then there's another way to get in touch with me. Yeah, if you want to send us a direct data stream, you can do that by sending an email at blow the Minded discovery dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, because it how stuff works dot com