Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock foresaw a world transformed by rapid technological change—a vision now turned reality.
Suresh Chandra Sarangi
During 1977, the epochal book “Future Shock”, written by futurologist and sociologist Alvin Toffler, took America by storm, including the Western nations. This classic work had the power to predict the changes human beings are going to confront, by rapidly changing Technologies, and also provided a road map to solve many of the pressing crises of the future.
In this explosive book, by way of information and ideas, Toffler tried to capture imagination so much so that the books in bookstores were cleared by the end of the day. It was not if tomorrow comes, but tomorrow had already knocked at the door, and the sweeping changes that were to be felt, absorbed, and adapted were phenomenal.
All- Encompassing
Change was fast, forthcoming, its accelerated speedFuture shock, in a sense, was our present, and we are overwhelmed by that sweeping change. Change has affected people, products, systems, communities, politics, economy and culture, our patterns of love, friendship, entertainment, tourism, medical treatment, travel, tourism family.
The entire gamut of things, like the emerging global civilization, the rise of new businesses, subcultures, lifestyles, and human relationships. The beauty of all these changes is the impermanence in them. The book was intriguing inasmuch as it provoked, frightened, though encouraging, and had a staggering impact. Today, we feel that change is happening faster than we think, and how prophetic Alvin Toffler was in encapsulating the change in his book.
The facts of Toffler’s analysis have all come true, and the social psychological implications of the technological revolution were like a shock that reshaped our thinking. Toffler has very cogently stated that change is inevitable, and those who welcome it and adapt to it shall survive the infinitesimal power of this ensuing explosive change. In a nutshell, the book spoke of a future that has already invaded us, and the roaring current of change and the pace of changes are reflected in our life, relationships, and culture with an intention to shatter the past myth.
The beauty of the book was that it was not so frightening inasmuch as it taught us to cope with the future, deepening our understanding in matters of the Obsolescence of data, the special significance of adaptation, and adaptability. It ushered in the death of permanence, the accelerative thrust, the pace of life, the importance of transience, the frequency of change, our society, with a nuclear and fractured family.
Convergence
In recent times, we have experienced how the converging technologies are transforming businesses, industries, and our lives. Change has landed us demonetizing and democratizing our access to food, information, water, energy, and an equitable distribution of the resources.
We have moved from a scarce world to an abundant world, tackled global challenges so far as food is concerned, eradicated hunger, poverty, and banished disease by harnessing technologies.. Today, AI is powerful, and the power of AI is reinventing the power of retail, advertising and entertainment, and education. This reminds us that in decades to come, with transformative breakthroughs, and the way innovation takes place, arguably, it would not only be real but the greatest display of human imagination.
How it feels to hear about the reality of flying cars, recollect our past myth of Ravan’s Pushpak Viman. Let us think of gridlocked cities, power grids, and integrated rivers, Google’s map directing you to the way forward in an unknown world, a picture across giant screens that shows us stormy skies, violent rivers, etc, that is being shown in Disney World or in Singapore, with augmented reality. Uber, with one small office, controls the travel necessities of a big town.
Sitting in the comforts of our room, we receive stationery, groceries, vegetables, medicines, and dresses. We do our money transfer, insurance, stock market investment, and ticket booking almost instantly. The smartphone in our pocket is significantly smaller, a thousand times speedier, and a million times more powerful than the supercomputer of technology.
Simulation
The power of disruptive innovation, with the introduction of silicon chips, heralded in founding of the digital age. It has been an acknowledged fact that these exponential technologies have been able to unleash the disruptive power of products, services, and markets. Commercial drones and robotics envision a new kind of electromagnetic motor, with machine learning helping to learn complicated flight simulations.
Hyperloop is a brainchild of Elon Musk, a beautiful transportation innovation. His SpaceX helped revitalize aerospace commercial launches, turning a fantasy into reality and creating a billion-dollar industry, insofar as creating the electric car. It is fascinating to hear that the Los Angeles to Sydney journey will take only 30 minutes.
Looks like the grandmother’s story of the fairyland. Of course, at the centre of all these exponential technologies is the internet, which integrates the world, and business is done at the speed of thought. The Internet is our benchmark, and more wealth could be created in one year than was created over a century in the past. Now, AI and robotics could change and reduce the workforce, creating a social problem. Let us think of the self-driving cars that were going to cover long distances in minutes.
Quantum computing is going to make the job simpler, faster, accurate, and it will revolutionize technological infrastructure. It is not too far away to have a Star Trek-like experience in the mundane world or an Avatar-like virtual reality that is approaching at a galloping speed. With the arrival of these converging and precision technologies, it can be elaborated that exponential technologies like Digitization, Deception, Disruption, Demonetization, Dematerialisation, and ultimately democratization.
Block Chain
Leave aside blockchain chain, etc, a simple software of PhonePe, that is being used by the marginalised in the society, has access, and this technology has revolutionized one transfer, quite incomprehensible a few days before. Earlier, products and services had a cost, to be paid in currencies, which has vanished as of now, except for limited commercial transactions.The world of finance is having a reincarnation. cameras, stereos, video games, TVs ,GPS, payments, calculators, and watches have all converged in a single smartphone.
Wikipedia has dematerialised the encyclopedia, iTunes has dematerialised the music store, phone pe, demo tapes, and photographs. The beauty of all these disruptive changes is that it has democratised with almost negligible cost, and information is accessible. The future seems more frightening with AI, and the neural data is slowly surfacing in AI form. The world is networked, with churning of data every second, 5G, balloons, and satellites.
With 3 G data, it took forty-five minutes to download high high-definition movie, 4 G shrank that data to 21 seconds, and five G takes a fraction of a second. Sensors are the latest invention in technology, which track sleep, heart rate, and its variability. Fitbit and Apple Watch provide your blood flow, heart rate, and blood sugar levels through an optical sensor that has revolutionized healthcare, wellness.
The weather forecast has been accurate, satellites speak about disease infection in plants, and the drones can do impossible things in warfare and Agriculture. Disaster relief and delivery, medical support during floods and cyclones, typhoons, and hurricanes are life-transforming, coming to the rescue of humanity in minutes. We have entered the world of vertical and augmented reality. Virtual reality today causes a lot more things like behaviour changes than traditional media. From climate change to biotechnology, things are changing too fast. A compelling vision of our transformative future seems more like a fairyland tale.
But change is true and has arrived. But if we do not cope with this converging technology, we feel and experience a future shock , Humanity has reached a critical moment of its existence over the planet. a rapidly changing and an unsettled and uncertain future confronts us. sometimes, this change is exhilarating and sometimes, it is frightening as any tampering may cause havoc and disaster.
Cutting-edge science and technology are providing a dream landscape, but adaptation remains the key to sustainability. The way there is nuclear proliferation, recklessly, nuclear deterrence appears to be breached, and any time inthe future, if misused by a megalomaniac, it shall welcome the doomsday.
In the last, humanity has to think of the bottom billions, with equitable distribution of resources and wealth, so that the converging technology can be possibly used to harness growth with equity and man can get liberation from a dystopian state. The next convergence, despite the miracle breakthroughs in technology, in order to be sustainable, has to be a balance between man and machine.
(The writer is a former General Manager of Bank of India and currently a visiting professor at KIIT School of Management. Views expressed are personal.)
