Posted on 06/29/2016 10:45:30 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Alvin Toffler, the far-seeing futurist who predicted humanity's rising anxiety with digital and technological progress in his hugely influential 1970 book "Future Shock," has died at the age of 87, his consulting company confirmed Wednesday.
Toffler — who is also credited with having coined the term "information overload" to describe people's struggle to keep up with exponentially expanding data — died Monday night at his home in Los Angeles, Toffler Associates said in a statement it released at the request of Toffler's widow, Heidi Toffler. No cause of death was given.
Alvin Toffler during a talk at the Astrobiology Roadmap Workshop in Mountain View, California, in July 1998. Paul Sakuma / AP "Future Shock" sold millions of copies at a time when society was in churn, amid riots over the Vietnam War, the maturation of the civil rights movement and the growth of centralized mass media. Toffler defined the phenomenon as "too much change in too short a period of time."
The book was the fruit of five years of work that began in 1965 with the publication of a magazine article titled "The Future as a Way of Life." It posited that human society was in transition to a globalized "post-industrial" age in which the majority of human activity was devoted to services, scholarship and creativity, as opposed to agrarian and manual labor.
Soon, he wrote, the post-industrial economy would give way to a knowledge-based "new economy," characterized by the ever-accelerating pace of daily life, the pulling apart of the traditional family, rapid changes in business and politics and the ascendance of technology in daily affairs.
Many commentators and scholars contend that all of those predictions — which were expanded upon in two influential followup best-sellers, "The Third Wave" (1980) and "Powershift" (1990) — have already come true.
Toffler, a former newspaper reporter and editor, had a gift for boiling down his complicated theories into easy-to-swallow nostrums, which immensely helped spread his philosophies. Among his pithy observations were these:
"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. " "If you don't have a strategy, you're part of someone else's strategy."
"Change is not merely necessary to life — it is life."
"It is no longer resources that limit decisions, it is the decision that makes the resources."
And perhaps most famous: "The future always comes too fast and in the wrong order."
In a 2002 interview with ComputerWorld magazine, Toffler surveyed the landscape and declared:
"There is no one driving force that is always the driving force. What's happening today is not just an incremental, straight-line extrapolation of what's happened until now. This is something new, transformatory. If this is really an IT revolution, then the one thing you don't expect is linear change. You expect ups and downs, surprises, zigzags, inversions. A revolution is an upheaval."
modern life not touched by his work," Deborah Westphal, chief executive of Toffler Associates, said Wednesday. "We are ever mindful of his influence as we navigate a world marked by widening artificial intelligence, globally connected societies and a quickening pace of change."
A private burial will be held in Los Angeles, the company said.
Toffler was a radical student at NYU in the 40’s, who said he was more interested in political activism than grades. He later worked at a union-backed newspaper and in the progressive media.
His business was making them the same thing.
I’m no Toffler fan.
I randomly came across the book and looked at it to see what silly things would be in it.
But it was not wrong.
Main one I remember is acceptance of homosexuality, perhaps even gay marriage but I’d have to look at it again to see if it is that specific.
Toffler was a radical student at NYU in the 40's, who said he was more interested in political activism than grades. He later worked at a union-backed newspaper and in the progressive media.
"If you are not a socialist in your 20s you don't have a heart, if you are a socialist in your 40s you don't have a brain" - Winston Churchill
From Wiki:
Toffler graduated from New York University in 1950 as an English major, though by his own account he was more focused on political activism than grades. He met his future wife, "Heidi", when she was starting a graduate course in linguistics. Being radical students, they decided against further graduate work and moved to the Midwest, where they married on April 29, 1950.
Seeking experiences to write about, Alvin and Heidi Toffler spent the next five years as blue collar workers on assembly lines while studying industrial mass production in their daily work. ..... In their first factory jobs, Heidi became a union shop steward in the aluminum foundry where she worked. Alvin became a millwright and welder.
His hands-on practical labor experience helped Alvin Toffler land a position at a union-backed newspaper, a transfer to its Washington bureau in 1957, then three years as a White House correspondent covering Congress and the White House for a Pennsylvania daily newspaper.
They returned to New York City in 1959 when Fortune magazine invited Alvin to become its labor columnist, later having him write about business and management. After leaving Fortune magazine in 1962, Toffler began a freelance career, writing long form articles for scholarly journals and magazines. .....
His 1964 Playboy interviews with Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov and Ayn Rand were considered among the magazine's best. .....
Toffler was hired by IBM to conduct research and write a paper on the social and organizational impact of computers, leading to his contact with the earliest computer "gurus" and artificial intelligence researchers and proponents. Xerox invited him to write about its research laboratory and AT&T consulted him for strategic advice. This AT&T work led to a study of telecommunications which advised its top management for the company to break up more than a decade before the government forced AT&T to break up.
In the mid-'60s, the Tofflers began five years of research on what would become Future Shock, published in 1970. .....
From Toffler Associates:
..... Alvin Toffler's wide life experience infused his work as a keen observer and predictor of global trends. His notable career includes work as an editor at Fortune magazine, a White House correspondent, and an educator.
From the beginning, he pursued knowledge up close. His earliest career was as a welder, a post he took in order to become fully informed about assembly lines and industrial mass production. This experience led to a stint as a newspaperman, writing first about labor before shifting his focus to business and management, and then to the computer and telecommunications businesses.
The Tofflers bravely forecast many of the realities of contemporary society and politics, including the acceleration of daily life, the decline of the nuclear family, cloning, virtual reality, information overload, and the threat of terrorism. Many of these predictions have come to bear and the central thesis of their work has proven absolutely true — that a knowledge-based new economy would replace the Industrial Age. .....
Sounds like he wanted to think and write from personal experience, so he went out and got a range of different experiences, in labor, politics and [information] business. He seemed to me leaning libertarian, but I didn't see him pushing or colouring any particular outcome in his books, just what the future might bring — whether I desired or agreed with a particular potential outcome (based on my knowledge or experience), it was a fascinating, educational and enlightening read. I don't automatically discard good or interesting ideas just because they come from someone I don't like or ideologically opposed to, or who they were in their youth, just as I do not automatically accept bad and known flawed ideas just because they come from someone I like or respect.
It always helps to be prepared and have strategies for the future new or recycled old ideas with new gist or lipstick (what we see in "gun control" and "minimum wage / dignity of work" and "isolationism vs globalism" etc.) — whether we like it or not, it helps to know what to expect so we could either be ready for them, help advance some of them or lead the fight against some of them.
"Ignorance may be a temporary bliss but it comes with permanent consequences"
Homosexual marriage, "test tube" babies, the "Information" society.
I used the word “prediction” as in a thing to come. If my term is inaccurate for your purposes, I hope your vocabulary is better after you have a stroke.
That's how I understood your post — you actually put it in quotes.
I did use quotes. I use them differently than most but I shouldn't have expected you to know that, as you don't know me personally. I use them to separate a word because I can't remember the exact word I wanted to use.
My apologies to you.
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