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“This book was recommended to me by My VP finance....he said to me get hands on it ROOKie!
dicky wrote this review Monday, October 12 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
All i cud say was Aye Aye Caps!”
“it's about system of human life,,,”
rohan u wrote this review Sunday, October 4 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“Nice decent book.”
sbhaskaran2k wrote this review Thursday, July 30 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“Future-TENSE
honshu5 wrote this review Thursday, April 16 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
Two things are on my mind right now: Alvin Toffler's Future Shock & an interview with an eminent city planner.
Toffler talks about the need to perceive the future and be ready for it. He rightly talks about our education being backword looking in a world that is headed towards the future. He also talks of innovations happening in the world, and how they have affected the society. The planner whom I interviewed also talked about the need to see the future & build cities for the same.
I believe that the future can be predicted only by understanding the past. Rote learning is not the point, but understanding & dissecting events of the past can provide us with crucial insights into the future. Hence, I started with a list of inventions / discoveries that have changed the course of human society today morning. This is the rough list (incomplete):
Mechanization:
Division of labour factory (Ford) - part mechanized factory - automated factory (CNC systems)
Manual labour - supervision of machines - creation of supervisory machines & networks (Computers)
Communication:
Telegraph - telephone - internet (written communication - spoken communication - communication & illustration)
Telegraph - radio - cellular phone networks (recorded communication - one way live communication - interactive two / multi way communication) - satellite networks (non-importance of physical location)
Painting - Symbolics - writing - coding (binary)
Transportation:
Personal transport (cars) - public transport (planes, trains) - personalized public transport (rent-a-car, chartered jets)
Biology:
Darwin's theory of evolution - Discovery of DNA - cloning (human controlled evolution)
Organ Transplants - test tube babies - cloning
Philosophy:
Marx & Lenin - Ayn Rand & Ford - Chomsky
(this sequence may be highly erratic as it is based on the limits / extents of my reading)
Construction & Habitat:
Structural grids - non-grid structures - self-evolving structures
Centenary structures - decadal structures - transient / temporary structures
Skyscrapers / ghettos - urbanization - urban + sub-urban
land cities - water cities - space colonies
The above is a mapping of the developments till now. Then, I proceeded to shortlist technologies that will affect the future: -
Mechanization: shape memorizing materials (AI) & nanoscale robots (AI+scale / energy reduction)
Communication: telepathy (meaning mind to mind conversation here)
Transport: teleportation
Biology: artificial culture of body parts, regrowth / healing controllers in brain
Philosophy: True democracy (like the IDEA ad we see, ultimate participation / control) or personalized democracy (choice of one's own set of rules from a given set)
Construction & Habitat: non-cities
That is where i stopped. The word non-cities hit me & the pattern in my own set of choices for the future hit me. If we are able to achieve teleportation, the need to live together / nearby would cease to exist. Infrastructure would change dramatically. If teleportation becomes possible, we could teleport our needs to our home & send back the wastes to a recycling facility. We would not need ANY PHYSICAL CONNECTIONS!!!!
As planners how far into the future are we looking? 10 - 20 - 50 years? Most of our urban projects take about 20 years to accomplish. But within that time, the original calculations have gone wrong. & yet that is just a short-sighted example. At the macro level, the government is investing some hundred thousand crores of rupees in developing india wide highway / railway network, urban transport systems, airports, etc. All of these will take atleast 10-15 years to materialize.
Imagine if, within that timeframe, say Tata is able to create a Nanoplane: a personal aircraft that runs 20 kms a litre (with partly air powered, partly solar powered) engine & that can also take off from rooftops. Imagine the lack of manpower in Air traffic control that would face us! & we are preventing aerospace use for SECURITY REASONS. One has to only imagine if aerospace is exploited for public use (not limited to chartered / public flights), one can form a 3 dimensional network of highways in the air without any substantial investment! The only large scale investment would be in form of ATC manpower! Any person desirous of using a car provides for the garage himself. The same will apply for landing facilities & maybe area / building wise ATC personnel. Even this would make our investments in highways & railways a joke! Because super-efficient engines are not too far away! (skeptics may use google to enlighten themselves) & I am still talking on a present scenario basis.
Now, imagine if teleportation is established in next 50 years! (Cellphones were established in 20 years. Teleportation of electricity within 1metre is possibly as of today) The immense investments that we made in next 20 years would be obsolete in just 30 more years! Not to say what a waste of land would be found, when physical transit would die off!
In my earlier post I mentioned that we provide about 20-25% of our urban spaces to streets & connecting infrastructure. All that space in cities & the space between cities would be now utilized for better purposes! & I have still not reached the climax!!!
What cities???? Once everything is teleported, why should i live next door to my office, or to anyone for that matter? I can reach anywhere i want in a matter of seconds via teleportation! Ditto for material needs!!! If we are using communication to talk to people in space on a live basis, why is it so hard to imagine we can even go there in future on a live basis??? That, is the ultimate death of urbanization! People are capable of building spaces better than cities to congregate. Our stadia, our theatres, our plazas could be in more exotic locations; and yet just a jiffy or few jiffies away! (hey, in case you forgot congestion, your current call drop rate could bring you back to earth!!!)
So, as planners: provided with the responsibility of developing human environments for the future, are we even thinking of the future? or are we just reflecting on the present & trying to mend things, rather than evolving with them??? While I completely agreed with the talk of the planner i interviewed, I am unable to understand why, inspite of having studied so much history, we are still not into the business of future anticipation (not prediction) based on current pace of growth (be it technological, political, philosophical,etc etc) If we are unable to provide visions into the future as planners, and guide public opinion towards the same, I believe we fail somewhere as professionals.
PS: I'm just an amateur thinker & a blog is definitely a product of the BETA world. Hence, it contains a collection of my random & almost live stream of thoughts. More importantly, I may have (with my limitations of exposure / understanding) got the chronology of past developments & connected future perceptions wrong. But, I DEFINITELY HAVE NOT got the point wrong. We ARE too SHORTSIGHTED to see what's going to hit us in the next few decades. If a much-publicized (thanks to Star Trek) technological research is beyond our vision of the future, how can we claim to be the directors of future growth patterns? We don't even try to understand what these patterns will be based on!!! One has to only imagine the combined effect of many such technologies, and lament the futility of our so-called PLANNING”“Scary how accurately someone in the 70's predicted our current socio-psychological issues!”
Tamara J wrote this review Saturday, December 6 2008. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“This book was published in 1970, and the author is predicting what the future is going to look like. Now, it is 2008, and we can judge how good his predictions were.
Neal R wrote this review Friday, November 21 2008. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
This book blew me away when I first read it 30-some years ago.
The author's basic theme is that in our current culture, we are not only being hit with change after change, but the rate at which additional changes are coming at us is rising. What effect is this going to have on us? The title,"Future Shock", reflects what is happening to us all as we see more and more and more change coming at us.
Other writers have talked about 2 big revolutions in human affairs. The first revolution was when men stopped being hunter-gatherers, and settled down to farming. Humans underwent an enormous change in their living standards, and a given area could support many more people. The second revolution was the Industrial Revolution. Again, the standard of living was increased tremendously. Of course, not all areas of the world experienced these changes at the same time. Some remote tribes are still hunter-gatherers. The Industrial Revolution has not come to all people yet today. Thomas Friedman, in his book "The World is Flat" argues that we are now undergoing a Third Revolution, in which all industrialized countries are tied to each other more and more strongly, due to improvements in computer technology, and the rate at which information can be transported from one place to another. One of the big effects is that jobs are now moving from one country (for example, the U.S.) to other countries, like China and India. As a result, some U.S. citizens are now unemployed, while the percentage of people doing "modern" work is rising in countries like India and China.
Toffler quotes Kenneth Boulding, who says, "The world of today...is as different from the world in which I was born as that world was from Julius Ceaser's...Almost as much has happened since I was born as happened before (in all of time)."
Examples of things that are changing:
1. in 1850, 4 cities on earth had 1 million people or more. In 1960, there were 141.
2. Half of the energy consumed by man in the last 2000 years has been consumed in the last 100 years.
3. In the 21 countries in the OECD, production has increased at the rate of 4 to 5 percent per year. That means that a teenager has twice as much "stuff" around him as he did when born. By the time he is 30, the amount of "stuff" will double again.
4. The fastest transportation available to man in 1600 BC was 20 miles per hour, by chariot. By the 1880s, trains were going 100 mph. In the 1960's, rocket airplanes were getting to 4,000 mph, and earth-orbiting satellites were going 18,000 mph.
Human beings have an internal model of the world they live in. As the world changes, men have to adjust their internal model, or the difficulty of dealing with the external world ncreases. This is part of the adaptation that we all go through to fit into the world around us.
Duration and transcience are conditions we all have to deal with. We now live in a "throw-away' society. We throw stuff away because there is a new and improved model. By the time I bring a new PC home from the store, it is obsolete. We also are living in a "rental" society. People used to buy cars and try to keep them as long as they could. Now they lease cars.
Furniture can be rented.
500 years ago, most people never moved more than 50 miles from where they were born. Today, one of my children has lived on three different continents (North America, Europe, and Asia. Obviously, relationships between people is different for the peasant living in 1500 AD, and the man who is not bothered by moving his family 15,000 miles. Friendships don't last as long.
When I entered the work force in the U.S. in 1960, the usual expectation was that a worker would work all of his useful life at one company. The worker and the company each felt more tied to the other. Now, that idea of faithfulness in the work place is laughable.
Toffler is interested more in how we can handle all of this change coming at us. Can we adapt to the ever-increasing flow?
What happens to us if we can't adjust to all this change? Experimental psychologists refer to aa "orientation response". Extreme OR's can be called a "startle reaction". If we are driving 60 miles an hour on a highway, and another driver swerves into our lane, we react by increasing our heart rate, internal levels of adrenaline, and other physical reactions. This is an illustration of the "fight or flight" response we have to a changing situation. If we successfully avoid the swerving car, our heart rate returns to normal, an do does our adrenaline, and we go back to driving "on automatic". If these events where the esternal world throws something at us that does not match our internel model of the world, we have to adjust to it. If the rate at which the world throws change at us increases, our rate of adjustment must also increase. There is good scientific data that suggests that a human being can only deal with a rate of incoming change only up to a limit.
What happens if we are overloaded with change? One reaction is denial that things are really changing so fast. Another is nostalgia for the "good old days", when life was simpler. Yes, life was simpler then, but the old days are not coming back.
Another is 'dropping out", going to live in a culture somewhere where things are not changing so fast. Move to the country and buy a farm. Join a sommune. Buy your own desert island.
Really, how much adrenaline can we pump into our systems? What if we are always in a "fight or flight" mode?
I think Toffler's ideas are a good description of the world we live in.
”
“Great thinking, when you read it now you realise that change cant be ignored. each of us has got to deal with it effectively. this would help us understand and overcome most of the troubles we face in life...”
Tony Thorpe wrote this review Thursday, May 22 2008. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No“Toffler will "shock" you with his great analysis in this book of his. I have been a fan of his since college.”
rose_dela_cruz wrote this review Tuesday, May 6 2008. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“Alvin Toffler is always an enjoyable read since he makes you think about things in a different way. I'm highly skeptical of "futurists" but who doesn't want to try to peer into the future? If you do, Toffler is at least a humble, thoughtful and intelligent writer. It's even interesting to read this book, even though it's dated, to see how the last chapter turned out.”
Ron B wrote this review Friday, February 29 2008. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
