Why We Need to Pick Up Alvin Toffler’s Torch

nytimes.com

25 points·tpatke··5 comments

I had a high school teacher who quoted Toffler a lot in class. I enjoyed his class so much I remember picking up future shock with its electric pink cover and its companion the third wave for pennies off of amazon. These books have been sitting on my bookcase for nearly fifteen years and nearly as many moves. Hadn't realized Alvin passed away last week. Maybe now I should give them a read.

At least read Future Shock, IIRC it's a pretty fast read and very focused/concise compared to his followups. The later books (Third Wave and Powershift) were more about taking the fundamentals from Future Shock and extrapolating how they might affect the world.

In many large ways, it’s almost as if we have collectively stopped planning for the future.

We never did "collectively plan" for the future, nor should we.

Humans do make plans for the future, especially humans who have agriculture. I agree we don't come together like a big hive mind and dictate what should happen next tuesday, and I can't see that could work at any level.

Technically though, we do form joint intentions in pursuit of long term goals. Decisions like "if we build the bridge from concrete it will cost twice as much but will last for 200 years vs until the next flood" need to be made by communities either via the fiat of a successful / popular overlord or jointly via consensus protocols. At various times there are different rational horizons for planning and coalition sizes. Possibly in times of greater change timer horizons are shorter and coalitions smaller? Hello intelligent agent community ! I'm asking you!

I think you deliberately grouped those two words together when that was not the author's intent. "collectively stopped planning" and "stopped planning collectively" have different meanings.

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