Alvin Toffler - Future Shock

Radicals frequently accuse the "ruling class" or the "establishment" or simply "they" of controlling society in ways inimical to the welfare of the masses. Such accusations may have occasional point. Yet today we face an even more dangerous reality: many social ills are less the consequence of oppressive control than of oppressive lack of control. The horrifying truth is that, so far as much technology is concerned, no one is in charge.

So long as an industrializing nation is poor, it tends to welcome without argument any technical innovation that promises to improve economic output or material welfare. This is, in fact, a tacit technological policy, and it can make for extremely rapid economic growth. It is, however, a brutally unsophisticated policy, and as a result all kinds of new machines and processes are spewed into the society without regard for their secondary or long-range effects.

Once the society begins its take-off for super-industrialism, this "anything goes" policy becomes wholly and hazardously inadequate. Apart from the increased power and scope of technology, the options multiply as well. Advanced technology helps create overchoice with respect to available goods, cultural products, services, subcults and life styles. At the same time overchoice comes to characterize technology itself.

Increasingly diverse innovations are arrayed before the society and the problems of selection grow more and more acute. The old simple policy, by which choices were made according to short-run economic advantage, proves dangerous, confusing, destabilizing.

Today we need far more sophisticated criteria for choosing among technologies. We need such policy criteria not only to stave off avoidable disasters, but to help us discover tomorrow's opportunities. Faced for the first time with technological overchoice, the society must now select its machines, processes, techniques and systems in groups and clusters, instead of one at a time. It must choose the way an individual chooses his life style. It must make super-decisions about its future.

Furthermore, just as an individual can exercise conscious choice among alternative life styles, a society today can consciously choose among alternative cultural styles. This is a new fact in history. In the past, culture emerged without premeditation. Today, for the first time, we can raise the process to awareness. By the application of conscious technological policy – along with other measures – we can contour the culture of tomorrow.

In their book, The Year 2000, Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener list one hundred technical innovations "very likely in the last third of the twentieth century." These range from multiple applications of the laser to new materials, new power sources, new airborne and submarine vehicles, three-dimensional photography, and "human hibernation" for medical purposes. Similar lists are to be found elsewhere as well. In transportation, in communications, in every conceivable field and some that are almost inconceivable, we face an inundation of innovation. In consequence, the complexities of choice are staggering.

This is well illustrated by new inventions or discoveries that bear directly on the issue of man's adaptability. A case in point is the so-called OLIVER (On-Line Interactive Vicarious Expediter and Responder. The acronym was chosen to honor Oliver Selfridge, originator of the concept.) that some computer experts are striving to develop to help us deal with decision overload. In its simplest form, OLIVER would merely be a personal computer programmed to provide the individual with information and to make minor decisions for him. At this level, it could store information about his friends' preferences for Manhattans or martinis, data about traffic routes, the weather, stock prices, etc. The device could be set to remind him of his wife's birthday – or to order flowers automatically. It could renew his magazine subscriptions, pay the rent on time, order razor blades and the like.

As computerized information systems ramify, moreover, it would tap into a worldwide pool of data stored in libraries, corporate files, hospitals, retail stores, banks, government agencies and universities. OLIVER would thus become a kind of universal question-answerer for him.

However, some computer scientists see much beyond this. It is theoretically possible, to construct an OLIVER that would analyze the content of its owner's words, scrutinize his choices, deduce his value system, update its own program to reflect changes in his values, and ultimately handle larger and larger decisions for him.

Thus OLIVER would know how its owner would, in all likelihood, react to various suggestions made at a committee meeting. (Meetings could take place among groups of OLIVERs representing their respective owners, without the owners themselves being present. Indeed, some "computer-mediated" conferences of this type have already been held by the experimenters.)

OLIVER would know, for example, whether its owner would vote for candidate X, whether he would contribute to charity Y, whether he would accept a dinner invitation from Z. In the words of one OLIVER enthusiast, a computer-trained psychologist: "If you are an impolite boor, OLIVER will know and act accordingly. If you are a marital cheater, OLIVER will know and help. For OLIVER will be nothing less than your mechanical alter ego." Pushed to the extremes of science fiction, one can even imagine pinsize OLIVERs implanted in baby brains, and used, in combination with cloning, to create living – not just mechanical – alter egos.

Another technological advance that could enlarge the adaptive range of the individual pertains to human IQ. Widely reported experiments in the United States, Sweden and elsewhere, strongly suggest that we may, within the foreseeable future, be able to augment man's intelligence and informational handling abilities. Research in biochemistry and nutrition indicate that protein, RNA and other manipulable properties are, in some still obscure way, correlated with memory and learning. A large-scale effort to crack the intelligence barrier could pay off in fantastic improvement of man's adaptability.

It may be that the historic moment is right for such amplifications of humanness, for a leap to a new superhuman organism. But what are the consequences and alternatives? Do we want a world peopled with OLIVERs? When? Under what terms and conditions? Who should have access to them? Who should not? Should biochemical treatments be used to raise mental defectives to the level of normals, should they be used to raise the average, or should we concentrate on trying to breed super-geniuses?

In quite different fields, similar complex choices abound. Should we throw our resources behind a crash effort to achieve low-cost nuclear energy? Or should a comparable effort be mounted to determine the biochemical basis of aggression? Should we spend billions of dollars on a supersonic jet transport – or should these funds be deployed in the development of artificial hearts? Should we tinker with the human gene? Or should we, as some quite seriously propose, flood the interior of Brazil to create an inland ocean the size of East and West Germany combined? We will soon, no doubt, be able to put super-LSD or an anti-aggression additive or some Huxleyian soma into our breakfast foods. We will soon be able to settle colonists on the planets and plant pleasure probes in the skulls of our newborn infants. But should we? Who is to decide? By what human criteria should such decisions be taken?

It is clear that a society which opts for OLIVER, nuclear energy, supersonic transports, macroengineering on a continental scale, along with LSD and pleasure probes, will develop a culture dramatically different from the one that chooses, instead, to raise intelligence, diffuse anti-aggression drugs and provide low-cost artificial hearts.