Future Shock - Book Review

Future Shock is a book written by Alvin Toffler. In this book he tells about how the future would be, how it is overwhelmed by change and how we should adapt to it. Today we live in a society and thus our way of thinking, style of living, how we progressed- all apart from depending on what we do depends to an extent on how our surrounding/society changes.
Gone are the days in which human growth was dependent on him (that was past) .In present and more so in future we would be more and more dependent on our society for our own growth.

In describing the future he refers to three phenomena that would impact it-
1. The Death of Permanence and The Rise of Transience
This refers to the rate at which things around us are changing. An example that illustrates this is- Humans have been on this earth for the last 50000 years. Now if we divide this into lifetime of 62 years each, we have around 800 lifetimes. Of these 800 full 650 were spent in caves. Only during the last 70 lifetimes has it been possible to communicate from one lifetime to another- this occurred due to writing invention. Only during the last 4 lifetimes it was possible to precisely measure time. Only during the last 2 we started using motors and other equipment. And now a majority of goods/services that we today use are a product of present, the 800th, lifetime. This example is enough to illustrate the rate at which things are changing around us. To add to this effect we in the 800th lifetime have developed technologies that further accelerate the rate of change (e.g. - computers and internet). Within a single lifetime, agriculture has lost its dominance as main source of growth for a nation. Services have now replaced agriculture. Economies are now tightly interlinked. It’s rightly said- “If America sneezes, India catches could.”
Companies in the past were governed in a stable society. Now the situation is different. With society changing rapidly, companies are forced to reduce their decision time. This leads to the collapse of hierarchical structure within an organization. The flow of information through a hierarchical structure takes a long time, which increases decision time. So if a lower level worker finds any major problem, he would be directly reporting to a manager rather than going through the normal structure. This has led to organization calling their employees as “associates” rather than as “subordinates” and organization calling itself as “flat organization” having a “flat structure”.
Simply stated – “Our society is moving at a very fast rate”.

2. Novelty or Newness
This refers to the new objects, new ideas, and new surroundings that we face daily. Think of a surrounding in which you were born and the present surrounding in which is new child is born. Now look for the vast changes that are present between these two cases. When you were born there were no computers, no internet, there were fewer people on this planet (it was less crowded), less pollution and less noise. A child born today has to face an ever changing society, which is bombarded with novelty. His mind sooner or later adjusts to it and it is of no surprise that children born today are said to be more intelligent than those born 20 or 30 years before.
Toffler here coins a new word- “Adhocracy” to define the new type of organization that would evolve. It means an organization with little or no structure, people here would be assembled to work for a particular task and when the task gets over then would be dissembled. People would be expected to “learn and relearn” things, as they would not know what next project they would be working on. Any new project may need newer things to learn and at this juncture for them to survive they have to relearn things.

3. Diversity
Here Toffler talks about the array of options that we have for any good in the market. The problem now is that sometimes we have enough large number of options that we can’t figure out which of them is best. This problem he refers to as “overchoice”. The goods are moving from standardization to customization.

The book moves on further to illustrate the limits of adaptability as both physical and psychological. When the man first landed on moon, there he was subjected to physical changes that were beyond his adaptive limit. So he customized the boundaries around him to suit him (read the gadgets used by astronaut). Toffler says that there are discoverable limits of amount of change that a human can absorb, and just by accelerating the change without determining its limit, we may submit masses of men to demands which they cannot tolerate. The effect is not only limited to physical dimension it affects our psyche as well. Both high and low transience are bad, for a human mind to work efficiently his mind has to face the changes within a particular limit.

The book ends with a solution for adapting to this situation. The prominent suggestion that Toffler gives is that we have to be future oriented rather than past oriented. Any decision taken should be taken considering the future not the past. If something has worked out in the past it does not mean that it would work in future as the future mostly would be different from the past. He gives importance to role that different class of people, like sociologist, futurologist, etc apart from the technocrats and politician, will have to play in taking any decision. Any technical solution which affects society, like introduction of new technology, should not be taken by technocrats or politician alone, it has to involve others like sociologist.