Future shock - 30 years later. Interview with Alvin Toffler

Alvin and Heidi Toffler wrote a long series of books dealing with the future, 'Future Shock' from 1970 - was the first and most well-known of them. The article was published in 2003 in a magazine called "Business 2.0" from the People and Computers group

By: James Daly, Business 2.0

 

Alvin Toffler, American Jewish sociologist and futurist, author of several prophetic bestsellers, died on June 27, 2016 in his sleep at his home in Los Angeles. He broke into consciousness thanks to his best-selling book that sold millions of copies and was translated into a decade of languages, including Hebrew: "The Shock of the Future" from 1970.

Tofflerniva in the book the information revolution and the communication revolution, when he claimed that the spread of information, capital and communication will lead to such rapid changes that they will create a new type of human society.

In an interview from 2000, he describes the changes, which we already began to feel then. He also pains the backwardness of the education system that prepares people for the world of yesterday.

When "Future Shock" was published in 1970, did you foresee the enormous impact it would have?

Alvin Toffler: Certainly not when Heidi and I wrote it. I think its success must be attributed to the fact that it is a serious book, written in a popular language. It is for ordinary people. The first hint that the book would sell more than ten thousand copies was during our lecture tour. We performed in front of an audience of colleges, and in front of an audience of business people, and the reactions were much more emotional than we expected. When we started talking about change, it hit people very hard. The system progressed very quickly, becoming something threatening, and even today it is progressing at the same speed. In fact, the pace of life has accelerated even more.

But today we adapt to changes in an amazing way. One generation later, haven't we gotten used to accelerated changes?

"I don't think so. The change is not only in the demand for faster responses. It is related to decision making. In the current genetic form, our ability to deal with a fast pace of decision-making is limited, this is not true for us as humans, but in terms of business, in terms of Congress, the government and other institutions. When it comes to making decisions, it's hard for us to keep up. You can speed up membership. You can speed up the computers, you can speed up the people, but there are a large number of people who feel that the future is coming so fast that they have to hold on by their fingernails in order not to get lost. That the world has become so fast, that there is no time to sit and ponder the complexities of the decisions they have to make.

It used to be thought that the more information, the better. Is this still true? Or have we reached a point where more immediate information causes harm?

"When there is too much, it is never good. Too much ice cream will kill you. I don't think the problem is information overload. What is more important is the load in decision-making, we believe that each person, or organization, can make a limited number of successful decisions at a given time. Until our biology changes, the speed at which we process information will have definite limits, however, there are incredibly powerful tools with which we can expand, for example, the possibilities of organizing information, the simplest example being our phone numbers. Why do they come in groups of three and four and not seven at once? Because we cannot remember seven digits easily, but we can remember three and four, this is the most primitive example of information layout. We can handle more information if we deploy it, and we can deploy it at higher and higher levels of complexity, and use better models of information organization, if you have strong models, you can handle more information.

But the quality of our decisions is decreasing?

"That's the thing, I know some elected officials who say they can't absorb all the information they need to make fully informed decisions, so their staff makes the decisions on most issues. To this I always answered: "Who exactly chooses your team?" This is a typical case. People are required to make decisions at an increasing speed without adequate support. There is a dangerous mismatch between the amount of decisions you have to make, the information available and the speed required to make decisions. The information is there, but in the wrong hands."

And how does it affect business?

There is a somewhat strange perception in business today, that things move so fast that strategy becomes obsolete. You just have to be flexible and adaptable. Or as they say today, 'easy'. It's a mistake. You can't replace strategy with 'ease'. If you don't develop your own strategy, you become part of someone else's strategy. In fact, you begin to respond to certain external conditions. Not having a strategy is perfectly fine, as long as you don't care where you're going. If you're traveling, and you don't care where you're going, you don't mind being pushed by the crowd towards some counter, and taking the flight that's leaving at that moment. Which means you don't care if you go to Pago Pago or Patagonia, and your luggage ends up in Portland. Lament strategy is just an invaluable idea, but a necessity, it doesn't mean you have to make five-year plans, like the Soviets did in Moscow, and then march decisively and uncompromisingly to the goal, that would be quite dangerous.

So how do you do it?

"You need a sequence of temporary strategies, and a certain process, or climate, that will allow this to happen."

Today's distributed society is almost completely opposite compared to what we thought it would be 50 years ago. So we thought there would be rigid government and think tanks, and that cloned people would march in total. Now you are describing an environment where the verb has more power, so the future is not what it once thought.

"exactly. The central assumptions of contracts like Orwell and a long line of science fiction writers, sociologists and other intellectuals were simple: more technology will result in a more centralized and bureaucratic economy.

Will more technology lead to more bureaucracy?

"We argued that one of the most fundamental changes would be a tendency towards diversity rather than uniformity.

Let's talk about business strategies. For example, to reach the market first. With all the changes swirling in the consumer's mind, does it matter at all?

"It is dangerous to be first, because of the natural tendency to resist changes. But I think it can be turned into an advantage. Look at the concept of increasing returns. But this is not a universal concept, and it is not suitable for all industries at any given moment. It should not be treated as a business law
universal. It is suitable for a certain market. What often happens is that we come up with a certain principle, which works in telecommunications for example, then we write about it, and talk about it and develop it into a universal axiom. One of the most significant ideas that my wife and I brought up in "Future Shock" and developed in the follow-up books is, in fact, the idea that there is a process of the disappearance of mass consumption and of differentiation (differentiation) in the economy and society. Companies are often more different than similar. That's why I'm skeptical of business laws. Ten laws, six laws, eight laws, whatever. Consultants, CEOs and others have a tendency to generalize where the opposite should be done. Which sounds logical in a mass production system of the second wave, but not at all conceivable if you have specific factors.

We are inundated with business books that offer rules for everything, from easy internet marketing to tips for getting clients. Some of them are a reaction to the huge level of changes. We seek guidance in an age of insecurity. Should these books be ignored?

"By what criteria do you decide that the book is right for you, you just take the last book off the shelf! Kevin Kelly wrote an excellent book - New Rules for a New Economy, a very good book. Smart book. But it is not suitable for everyone, and I as a reader should know how to identify what is suitable or not suitable for me. Perhaps the most effective approach is not to accept all the rules as they are, but to choose which one fits your niche, and then adapt them to your needs."

Does the future have a bad name?

It depends on the country and culture you belong to. In Europe, the future has a terrible name. Instead of a logical and critical response to genetic engineering, for example, there is panic and stupidity masquerading as concern for the public and so on. Europe is about to shoot itself in the head, just as it did before. She shot herself in the foot by ignoring the entire genetic information technology revolution. Today, despite the fact that it has a strong medicinal base and chemical industries behind it, it is about to be pushed aside by the latest technological advances of the human race. It is a deep cultural matter. In contrast, the Japanese look forward to the future with optimism."

At the same time, the Japanese business culture does not encourage entrepreneurship, like the American business culture.

"Yes, that is absolutely true. But it's under the surface. Walk into a London bookstore and you'll see endless rows of books on the British aristocracy and Victorian gardens or the Golden Age of Queen Elizabeth. In a Japanese bookstore, however, the same rows are filled with books about the future of transportation, the future of health, the future of urban development, and so on. We Americans, on the other hand, have neither a past nor a future. We are what the advertisers in the 60s called Pepsi, "the Now Generation. We tend to focus on the immediate." From this place also came the concept that strategy is not important."

Has the role of the consumer changed?

"The consumer is now one of the participants in the production process. In one way or another, we make consumers our allies and, as a result, partners in production. The consumer today is what we call a "Prpsumer". Years ago, you grew your own food, sewed your own clothes, built your own house with your own hands. The industrial revolution separated the product from the consumer. The economic concept of production and consumption has become two different concepts. Today you make a car in Detroit, which you buy and drive in California. The producer and the consumer have never met. What is happening now is a change where the boundaries between the producer and the consumer or the customer are blurring. The consumer provides a touch that the manufacturer needs. Without this information, manufacturers will make a product that they will not be able to sell, and no one will want. So that in more and more technological industries there is a joint team that works together - consumer and supplier. The relationship between the consumer and the producer has changed in a fundamental way, and has become much stronger due to the Internet. That's what the internet does - let's say you bought a car and suddenly you find out that it has a problem with the carburetor or part of it, or it's defective. Suppose something doesn't work. You take it to the dealer and say: "fix it". The dealer tried to fix it, returned the part to you, and it's still broken. You send it over and over again. You get angry, the dealer gets angry, no one can fix it, you fight, and finally you walk away helpless. Now you can go online. I just bought a gadget model 2001. Someone else bought it, I have a problem with A, B and C. What about you, before you can think of the words "lawsuit", you have 700 complaints, and you have grounds for a lawsuit - the reliability of the product or something else."

It would be a strong argument to go for a well-known firm, wouldn't it? Is it perceived as truth, as credibility?

"Yes, but fundamentally, our connection to ideas is eroding, because ideas become obsolete more and more often. So you process more and more materials, and you have more and more images, times and models in mind. Your connection to the place becomes more and more temporary, because we are mobile. So we argued that since relationships are becoming more and more temporary, loyalty to the product and the firm decreases."

are you an optimist

"Yes, but in most cases, there are also scary consequences. One of them is what I call the end of the truth. Deception technologies are growing at a much faster rate than authentication technologies. Today we have powerful tools to deceive each other."

What is more important today: information or disinformation?

"Remember that disinformation is simply part of information. And it is not harmful at all. What do you call knowledge that is not accurate or correct anymore! Outdated knowledge, I call it Ignorage, the Age of Ignorance. There are lots of pits around. It's something people believe in, a fact or process that is no longer valid."

for example?

“Look at our schools. Our education system is type B, a factory-like organization that pumps out outdated knowledge in outdated ways. And it's not just that the science books are out of date. They are simply not connected to the future of the children they are responsible for. All education stems from a certain perception of the future, it stems from some explicit assumptions as to what the future holds. When your kids come home and ask: 'Why do I need to learn algebra?! You don't answer them: 'Because our ancestors studied algebra.' You say they will need algebra in the future. It means that you have an assumption about the future, you will need algebra, or marketing, or something else. This means that parents, curriculum designers and educators have a whole set of assumptions about the future of society, the world's population. If the model you have in mind is one of an assembly line economy and factory chimneys, that's what you're preparing your children for, as has been done for the last century or more. You treat them like raw material. You enslave them to a routine process - completely non-individualized, without personally caring for each child. Furthermore, you give each child repetitive monotonous work to prepare him for a life of repetitive monotonous work in the factories and factory-like offices in which the child will spend his life. So that in the last 100-150 years we have followed the children's future exactly.
Today we lie to our children, because this process no longer shows the children what they will find outside when they open the door. When I worked in the factory, if the boss knew that I was reading a book at the expense of working time in the factory, he would fire me immediately. I discovered a way to do the same job in less time and still have time to read. But he wasn't interested in my head. He wanted the muscles. Today we are interested in contract workers, or in innovative people, with imagination, thought and challenge who will work with us."

What is the role of trade unions in this age of knowledge workers and freelancers?

"The unions decreased from about 18 million members to 13 million. Any company that would have lost such a large market share would surely have been closed or bought by someone else, or going through a recovery process. Now, I want to emphasize that unions have social roles, they are not just economic machines. But if we look at them for a moment as a business, they are the kind of business that takes your membership fees and uses them for all kinds of purposes. And I still believe that where there are large numbers of second-wave mass industrial workers standing up against big company, they do need protection, but fewer and fewer workers in the American economy fit that model. The unions still haven't figured out how to unionize the knowledge industry workers. So the trade union model is losing its validity."

Is there a separation between high-tech and the other professions?

"Yes, but it will change because the business interest is to bring as many people as possible into the network, the companies want to send bills to everyone. If we were to continue on the old-fashioned, Marxist line, 100 or 50 years ago, we would say that the elites do not want to give access to knowledge to the lower classes. The truth is they are interested in it, the reason the telephone spread so quickly was that it was needed to do business and compete, to reach customers and potential employees and so on. So he promoted this process. In fact, the people who tried to prevent the spread of the telephone were usually dictators like Stalin who feared it and forbade people from talking to each other, but it is definitely in the interest of the powerful forces in our society to make the Internet as universal as possible."
"You can use the internet to eliminate poverty, it's true that there are places in the world that still don't have electricity, that don't have clean drinking water, that have such great poverty, that there are prerequisites that need to be met before you can even think of connecting them to the grid. But when you take into account wireless communication, satellites and new forms of energy that I think are already emerging, I think that ways will be found to connect places that until now seemed impossible to connect to, one example is the Peruvian village where the whole village is connected, they sell products to New York, and they tripled their income the village Several years ago, we were at dinner in Denver with friends, and they served us fruit for dessert. The fruits were delicious. I asked what their name was, and they told us, and I asked where we could find them here, and they said we couldn't. You can't buy them anywhere in the US because they only grow in a small place outside Bogota, where the climate conditions are right and so on. The internet makes it possible. The reason you couldn't do it before is that the people in Bogotá didn't know that there was a potential market in Denver, and the people in Denver didn't know that the fruit existed, it raises the thought that there are a lot of such products, which are produced in small quantities only, you can't feed the American market with this fruit, but why not Sell ​​it to a small suburb in Denver? This is what I call "micro-commerce". I imagine, through the power of the web, we will discover, literally, millions of micro-markets, creating a huge amount of micro-commerce, which will have a huge beneficial effect on tens of thousands of villagers and millions of people all over the world."

And what will happen after the network?

(Pause). "Bio network."

bio network?

"I just made up the name, so don't make it hard on me. This is the connection between the network and biology. So far, information technology has influenced biotechnology. From this point on, biotechnology begins to influence information technology, and I think it's inevitable that we'll see all kinds of weird mixtures of the two."

What about the other side of the matter - the waiver of biological controls?

"I don't know, I guess. It will reach the level of science fiction. But on the other hand, today we live in yesterday's science fiction. We hypothesize, as we wrote in "The Shock of the Future", that not only will the day come when we will have the ability, on a certain level, to shape our child before he is born, but also invite all kinds of strange abilities. I will order my child to have a developed sense of smell like a dog, or to be able to see and react to kinetic movement like a frog, and similar enhanced abilities, this sounds crazy and terribly scary, and it is clear that our society is not mentally and morally ready for any of these, but I think that in terms of technology, this is what will happen .

 

Since the publication of the book, has there been anything that has really surprised you?

"The time it took for the ideas to percolate, 20-30 years. The irony is that we are starting to talk about things like the importance of understanding and managing time in the business world, no one even started to address it, even after the huge impact of 'future shock', before the big companies started laying off tens of thousands of workers. It was only then that the idea that something was happening started to seep in, often these ideas creep into your mind when the ground has already started shaking. Before that, you were just too complacent.”

The second wave

Toffler describes stages in human hysteria as a series of waves. The first wave was the development of agriculture. The second was the industrial revolution. The third is the current age of knowledge, driven by information technology and the demand for freedom.

Increasing Returns - Increasing Returns

The law of increasing returns means that the greater the abundance of products, the higher their value. This is a concept completely contrary to one of the basic axioms of the industrial age. which says that the value of a commodity, whether it is platinum or plastic beads, is determined by its scarcity in the market.

More on the subject on the science website

The best way to predict the future is to create it

Between hope and disaster - about genetics and genetic engineering