But we don't have commonplace human cloning. Or in fact practical human cloning of any kind.
>“The roaring current of change,” he said, was producing visible and measurable affects in individuals that fractured marriages, overwhelmed families and caused “confusional breakdowns” manifested in rising crime, drug use and social alienation.
Aren't those issues mostly caused by the sharp neoliberalization of society?
>He was among the first authors to recognize that knowledge, not labor and raw materials, would become the most important economic resource of advanced societies.
Under what accounting system is that actually true?
>Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House, met the Tofflers in the 1970s and became close to them. He said “The Third Wave” had immensely influenced his own thinking and was “one of the great seminal works of our time.”
This does not speak at all well of Toffler's work.
>He advised readers to “concern themselves more and more with general theme, rather than detail.” That theme, he emphasized, was that “the rate of change has implications quite apart from, and sometimes more important than, the directions of change.”
This does not speak at all well for Toffler's work.
The bell tolls and it tolls for us all, but I can't help but wish he'd taken the time to recant some of his more explicitly reactionary work.
>> >He was among the first authors to recognize that knowledge, not labor and raw materials, would become the most important economic resource of advanced societies.
> Under what accounting system is that actually true?
It's not that controversial idea anymore. See, for example [1]
Contrary to economists from Adam Smith to Karl Marx to Thomas Piketty, our riches cannot be explained by the accumulation of capital, as the misleading word capitalism implies. The Great Enrichment did not come from piling brick on brick, or bachelor's degree on bachelor's degree, or bank balance on bank balance, but from piling idea on idea. The accumulation of capital was of course necessary. But so were a labor force and the existence of liquid water. Oxygen is necessary for a fire. Yet it would be unhelpful to explain the Chicago Fire of October 8–10, 1871, by the presence of oxygen in the earth's atmosphere.
>our riches cannot be explained by the accumulation of capital, as the misleading word capitalism implies. The Great Enrichment did not come from piling brick on brick, or bachelor's degree on bachelor's degree, or bank balance on bank balance, but from piling idea on idea.
"brick on brick, or bachelor's degree on bachelor's degree, or bank balance on bank balance" does not have anything to do with neither Marx's nor Adam Smith's definition of capital. And both already knew the importance of ideas...
You are the reason why I steer clear of Facebook on days when a prominent death is the top headline.
"'X' had ties to a politician I don't like, ergo he sucked. Q.E.D.", is of course a rather ridiculous criticism. Far more importantly though, the time for such criticism is either when 'X' is alive, or when 'X' is brought up in the future. The comments section of an obituary is really not the time.
I'd long classed Toeffler into the group of generally overhyped futurologists, and in particular found his endorsement by Gingrich anything but salutory.
And then I ran across a copy of FutureShock a few months back. I've only skimmed through it and read a few select passages, but what I saw impressed me. I've been doing a great deal of reading on the future and past, and in particular, on past predictions of the future. Many are silly, or specious, or profoundly wide of the mark. Toeffler managed to capture an intersection of technology and psychology in a way that few others had.
He wasn't chasing the starry-eyed dreams of Vannevar Bush and Arthur C. Clarke. He wasn't simply touting the business advantages of endless information. Among other things, Toeffler has one of the earlier discussions of information overload I've seen, one I found quite intelligent and discerning. I'm hoping to have time to go back and dig through his work for more, looking for both his accurate predictions and goofs.
I've only read a couple of his works, but I'd always thought they were overrated. His work seemed to have a "The horror" (while staring with sick fascination) vibe that I associate with the 70's. Not that there isn't plenty to be horrified by in this world, but the key is to do something about it, not just stare at it.
I more tend to consider his works overrated in that he successfully "prevented" the "terrifying" future of never-ending, ever-accelerating change he foretold by managing to make sure that very little at all was allowed to change.
Call it a generational difference and also disrespect for the deceased, but being a child of the late '80s who grew up with Gingrich a major figure and "future shock" a commonplace concept, I've reached the 2010s and managed not to be future-shocked because people keep acting on their "future" shock by keeping things largely the same.
Worse, the social problems he was preaching about happened despite the lack of flying cars and techno-singularities, because it turned out they were largely about underlying slow shifts in social conditions anyway rather than about the shock of an ever-accelerating technological change that never happened.
But we don't have commonplace human cloning. Or in fact practical human cloning of any kind.
>“The roaring current of change,” he said, was producing visible and measurable affects in individuals that fractured marriages, overwhelmed families and caused “confusional breakdowns” manifested in rising crime, drug use and social alienation.
Aren't those issues mostly caused by the sharp neoliberalization of society?
>He was among the first authors to recognize that knowledge, not labor and raw materials, would become the most important economic resource of advanced societies.
Under what accounting system is that actually true?
>Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House, met the Tofflers in the 1970s and became close to them. He said “The Third Wave” had immensely influenced his own thinking and was “one of the great seminal works of our time.”
This does not speak at all well of Toffler's work.
>He advised readers to “concern themselves more and more with general theme, rather than detail.” That theme, he emphasized, was that “the rate of change has implications quite apart from, and sometimes more important than, the directions of change.”
This does not speak at all well for Toffler's work.
The bell tolls and it tolls for us all, but I can't help but wish he'd taken the time to recant some of his more explicitly reactionary work.