I Was Just Thinking Future Shock “The Future ... something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does whoever he is” (CS Lewis). March 2007

by Don Huntington

I remember sitting in front of a black-and-white TV set in 1954 while watching Dave Garroway host a Today show that centered on the exciting possibilities of the future. In particular, the show raised the question of what the world would be like in 1974.

I have the distinct memory of feeling disappointed when 1974 finally arrived and not only did we not have a gyrocopter in our garage, as Garroway had predicted, nobody we knew had a gyrocopter. Nevertheless, 1974 was a pretty exciting place to live compared with 1954. Things like the Interstate Highway System, earth-orbiting satellites, color TVs, inter-continental telephone connections, and fast food restaurants were transforming the planet in ways that few people in 1954 could have imagined.

In 1970 Alvin Toffler wrote a best-selling book, Future Shock, which focused on the reality that technology is altering the world faster than some people can adjust their worldviews to accommodate it. In other words, society is changing faster than some people can change their understanding of society. As a result, according to Toffler more-and-more people have a sense of their own culture being foreign to them — future shock becoming a strange form of culture shock.

Not only is the world becoming a much different place than it was in the past, Toffler said, but the rate-of-change is itself speeding up.

Of course, the early 70s, when Toffler wrote his book, was a watershed time for the electronics industry because shortly afterwards the first microchip came onto the market and the rate of change in the world really began to pick up. Things like word-processing and spreadsheets radically transformed the world so that, exactly as Toffler had predicted, the changes from 1970 to 1980 (ten years) were comparable to the changes from 1950 to 1970 (twenty years).

So in 1980 Toffler wrote a book called the Second Wave describing the social effects of the immense revolution that the microchip was bringing upon the world — a technology that hadn’t existed ten years earlier when he had written Future Shock.

The capacities of computers are doubling every 18 months. Safe to say, an 8-fold increase in capacity, coupled with the World Wide Web and the explosive growth of the Internet, has introduced greater changes into our culture during the past five years than during the three decades of 1954-1984. I have a cell phone with free nationwide roaming and long-distance, plus it also includes an appointment book, camera, games, a clock, and a database with hundreds of addresses and phone numbers packaged in a device not much larger than a deck of cards. No scientist in the world in 1974 could have imagined such a thing. No layperson in 2000 could have imagined it.

I’m always impressed by how technology lands on top of us, it seems, with no advanced fanfare. Microcomputers, electronic keyboards, wireless phones, computer projection systems, the Internet, iPods, video games…. Everything came as a surprise; I never saw any of these things coming before it got here. I was amazed by VHS tapes, and never imagined how quickly DVDs would replace them.

I’m having a great time! I can’t wait for the future to hurry up and get here! Science is making available for my enjoyment and growth more good things than I could take complete advantage of if there were a hundred of me!

Even more gratifying is the realization that the technology revolution is only beginning. What products and services will result from the current advances in studying the human genome, for example? A company recently announced the successful test of two applications running on a quantum computer that one day might achieve processing speeds billions of times faster than the silicon computers we use today. Elements in the computer are the size of atoms and molecules. What products will come out of that technology?

I could no more imagine what’s coming in the future than Dave Garroway in 1954 could have imagined Halo, or the iPhone that Steve Jobs recently announced. Three years from now I’m going to be experiencing things that I can’t even imagine this morning.

One hundred and twenty-five years ago Robert Louis Stevenson wrote:

The world is so full of a number of things I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.

My world today is full of things that Stevenson couldn’t imagine. And we haven’t seen anything yet, because the future is coming on, as Lewis’ quote reminds us, at the rate of 60 minutes per hour. I can’t change that or slow it down.

I know this depresses many people and dismays more. However, my wish is to be dazzled by all this stuff.

And I am!

Dr. Don Huntington
Editorial Director
don@110mag.com