Future shock

What Hacker News says

1. keernanFeb 2026
   One of the most impactful books I ever read was Alvin Toffler's Future Shock.

   Its core thesis was: Every era doubled the amount of technological change of the prior era in one half the time.

   At the time he wrote the book in 1970, he was making the point that the pace of technological change had, for the first time in human history, rendered the knowledge of society's elders - previously the holders of all valuable information - irrelevant.

   The pace of change has continued to steadily increase in the ensuing 55 years.

   Edit: grammar

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2. thisoneisrealSep 2025
   "Future Shock" by Toffler. It was published in 1970, but the predictions are remarkably accurate and (most of) it could easily have been written today. The core idea is about how the rate of change in industrialized societies is accelerating, plus the implications of that and strategies for dealing with it.
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3. keernanJan 2025
   The author focuses on the pace of technological change as a big insight. I had the same experience in 1970 when I read Alvin Toffler's book, Future Shock. The theme of the book was the impact upon humanity of the ever increasing pace of change through millennia.

   See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock

   Reading Future Shock shaped my world view like no other single event in my life; and it sparked a life long fascination with, and love of, technology. It's how I spend almost every waking hour of my day at the age of 72.

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4. markgohoDec 2024
   the greatest Futurist of our time was Alfred Toffler cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Toffler

   His books, Future Shock (1970), The Third Wave (1980), and Powershift (1990) represent peak prediction literature based on a philosophy that since 1950 we've entered the Third Wave (first wave being neolithic => agriculture, second being agriculture => industrial, third wave being industrial => post-industrial)

   If you read this article and got interested in this kind of thing, check out Toffler. Nearly everything he predicted has come true (minus us mostly living in underwater dwellings, which in his defense, hasn't come true YET).

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5. dredmorbiusSep 2024
   Science fiction (novels, short stories, or by the 1950s films, and 1960s telvision) doesn't have a primary goal of predicting the future but rather of selling entertainment. To the extent it is speculative, it's almost always discussing contemporary circumstances sufficiently distant setting (in time and space) to be able to comment on it in a way which both minimises social censure and reaction and gives a potential for a fresh perspective (in the best cases). Of course, much of it is simply, or at least largely, escapist space opera / space westerns (Buck Rogers, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica (original series). And yes, some of the escapist content does have real science or predictive value.

   But in balance it's an exceedingly poor prospecting ground for hard-nosed, realistic, and/or accurate predictions. For much the same reason that most space ships are laid our horizontally, with gravity working on the frontal rather than coronal plane is that sets built on Earth are far more easily built and filmed that way, SF addresses its creations, narrative, and audience-appeal needs over any putative scientific or prophetic accuracy.

   And sure, there are notable counterexamples.

   E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops is frighteningly accurate in a world much like that of the 2010s / 2020s.

   Arthur C. Clark in some works hits on some remarkably accurate depictions of at least parts of a future world. Imperial Earth envisions both handheld computers and a culture obsessed with recording every passing moment in a way that's nearly selfie-culture (though he seems to have missed influencers). 2001: A Space Odyssey predicts tablet computers and video telephony with reasonable accuracy (though all but completely ignores their social implications).

   Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game presages blogging to some degree (though generally overstating its influence, as Randall Munroe spoofed: <https://www.xkcd.com/635/>).

   And there's a whole slew of dystopian SF which has materialised in some form or another, from Ray Bradbury ("The Veldt"), Philip K. Dick (too many to mention), William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, etc., etc., etc. I and others suspect that's to some extent less prophetic than direct stimulus, with contemporary techbros aping their favourite adolescent sci-fi universes without asking "are we the baddies?" or whether they should.

   But if you want hard predictions about the future, it's probably better to look to the literature which specifically and seriously attempts to do this, outside of a fictional context.

   One such book is Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, now 54 years old.[1]

   I'd read that, for the first time, on its 50th anniversary. I was struck by much, and found it on balance to have stood the test of time quite well, and much better than is typical for the genre. As to accuracy, there seem to be three general cases:

   - Specific proponents of specific technologies virtually always overestimated the acceptance and impact of those technologies. The notable exception is, of course, information technology, though even for it the specific ways in which it has and hasn't advanced is worth close study.

   - Virtually all of the social dynamic predictions seem laughably modest today --- developments in racial, gender, and sexual equality and acceptance, amongst others. Though on reflection this isn't so much that the predictions were bold, but that they've come to pass. We are on the far side of the singularity for these changes, for the most part. What was written in the context of a world in which these changes lay in the future reads much differently now that the inflection points are in the past. At the same time, it's also clear that such changes need not be permanent, and that perhaps such dynamics tend more towards cyclical patterns or pendulum swings, with greater and lesser liberalisation at different points in time.

   - Much of the psychological and sociological concerns over advancing technology, faster paces of change, and an ever-growing onslaught of information seem to me to have been extraordinarily prescient, and largely born out. The disruptive effects, both on a personal psychological level and on a collective sociological one, appear to be profound, and we're still in the midst of discovering just how much so.

   In thinking about how technological change manifests, I've come up with an ontology of the types of technological mechanisms which operate: fuels, materials, information (receipt, processing, storage, transmission), networks, systems, process knowledge, causal knowledge, power transmission and transformation, and hygiene (dealing with unintended consequences).[2]

   Much of the Industrial Revolution (~1800 -- 1950 or so) was fundamentally grounded in new fuels (coal, petroleum, natural gas) and power transmission and transformation (particularly electricity and magnetism), with strong secondary effects through improved and expanded materials (Bessemer steel, aluminium, plastics), communications (telegraph, telephone, radio, television) and recording (rapid print advancements, photography, phonography, film). Since 1950, it's been information technology which seems to have been in the forefront, making some profound advances (overall processing and storage capacities) whilst remaining stubbornly stagnant in others (forecasting, meaningful automation and controls). Networks and systems have been primary secondary effects.

   Hygiene is the ninth factor I'd come upon, and falls out of the recognition that all technologies have both intended and unintended effects. As technologies increase in complexity, I strongly suspect the latter dominate, exacting something of a drag on overall progress.

   The element that's missing from my typology is the interaction between technology and society as a whole. I don't have much to say on that at the moment, though I feel it's quite significant. I'm noting that lapse for the moment.

   ________________________________

   Notes:

   1. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock> <https://archive.org/details/isbn_0553132644>

   2. I've written on this a few times at HN and elsewhere, searching Algolia for "tech ontology" or "technological ontology" should turn up some references. I'm increasingly feeling that the idea probably needs a book-length treatment discussing each mechanism, how it applies (some of the mappings I make may strike some as obscure, e.g., that knowledge is in some ways a network function, as expressed in the phrase "web of knowledge"), and what the capacities and limitations of each mechanism are.

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6. fzzzyMay 2024
   Also the book Future Shock.
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