Future Shock moved “the future” from the sole realm of science fiction into contemporary discourse. 
Alvin and Heidi Toffler—the Tofflers—began making it respectable to think seriously about the future and what we might do today to make it better.¹ Granted, the RAND Corporation was founded in 1948, and Herman Kahn was thinking the unthinkable long before the Tofflers, but RAND’s and Kahn’s mission was to prevent World War III, not to wake up the public about continuous societal change.
So too in Paris, Gaston Berger created the Centre d’études Prospectives in 1957 and Bertrand de Jouvenel created Futuribles in 1960. None of these engaged the public in rethinking the character of civilization. Also, a year before Future Shock was published, the first doctoral program on the study of the future opened at the University of Massachusetts’s School of Education.² But it, too, had little public outreach and finally closed its doors a decade later. It should also be acknowledged that the first Western philosopher of continual change was the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus, but his words were not heard around the world until many years later.
So the Tofflers were not the first to address the ideas, but they were the most effective in waking up millions around the world to continuous global change. Now, 50 years later, when someone asks “What’s a futurist?” it is still possible to answer: you remember that book Future Shock? Well, that’s what futurists do—systematically look at future possibilities, consequences, and, given all that, figure out what we should do to improve our prospects. The Tofflers stressed that we—leaders and the public—had to anticipate change in order to manage change. Today there are legions of “change management” consultants worldwide.
Rereading Future Shock for this essay, I was reminded that it is a gigantically rich book with massive documentation, while still being reader-friendly. The Tofflers were really good writers. It made the rest of us futurists back then secretly a little bit jealous. None of our books sold in numbers even close to those realized by Future Shock. Many of us (though there weren’t many of us then) did feed the Tofflers with research, ideas, and insights,³ but they brought our input to life with easily readable prose. Hence, they more than any other intellectuals opened the doors of perception and brought some acceptance to the work of futurists.
So now, fifty years later, the new forces of change are the synergies among Moore’s Law (computer cost/performance doubling every 18 months); Nielsen’s Law (internet bandwidth capacity grows 50% per year); computation science (computer simulations can run millions of experiments in the time it takes to set up physical lab experiments, rapidly expanding the pool of scientific knowledge upon which technology draws); artificial narrow intelligence (AI that drives a car but cannot diagnose cancer) and potential artificial general intelligence (we do not yet have AGI, at least in the public, but if we do get it, it would address new situations by drawing on all accessible relevant information in order to rewrite its own code; it would solve novel problems in a similar manner to how we humans draw on many sources to do so); and synergies among NT (Next Technologies such as synthetic biology, genomics, nanotechnology, 3D/4D printing of materials and organics, quantum computing, robotics, AI/Avatars, cloud and big data analytics, artificial and augmented reality, Internet of Things, tele-everything and everybody, semantic web, telepresence, holographic communications, blockchain, collective intelligence, drones, driverless cars and other autonomous vehicles, and conscious-technology [mutual direct interaction of mind and machine]). Since this list is way too long to keep repeating when talking about what technologies will continue to accelerate change, I prefer to simply say NT (Next Technologies) as we do with ICT, which covers many things as well.
Why do I stress this? The Tofflers talked about adapting to the future. Almost as if the future were set, out there, and will come down on us like a coming rainstorm. Granted, the Tofflers did write very clearly in the introduction that the future was not determined, fixed, as if it were a knowable “thing.” Instead, the introduction states: “No serious futurist deals with predictions… This means that every statement about the future ought, by rights, be accompanied by a string of qualifiers—ifs, ands, buts, and on the other hands… Rather than do this, I have taken the liberty of speaking firmly, without hesitation, trusting that the intelligent reader will understand the stylistic problem.” Indeed we do, and did, but the strategies to prevent future shock in the first sections of the book still focused more on adapting to the future than on inventing or shaping the future. The current acceleration of the rate of change and the foreseeable synergies among NTs change what we think is possible, or at least it should change what we think is possible.
So, we should also talk about inventing or shaping the future, since there are far more possibilities than we are able to implement. Hence, choice and decision-making become more important than in the past, when there were fewer options. The question, then, becomes about what we should create, along with how we adapt. What future do we want to help emerge from the synergies among NTs that can address global challenges? This is the drama today: we are in a race between implementing ever-increasing ways to improve the human condition and addressing the seemingly ever-increasing complexity and scale of global problems.
In biology, resilience is the ability to respond, adapt, and survive disasters. Resilience for humans is also this, plus the ability to anticipate. And this part, Future Shock nailed! The more you anticipate, Future Shock argued, the less likely you will suffer from future shock. Ah, but too many of us have become numb to change: Upgrade to the next version of the software whether we like it or not; get the next iPhone even though the current one works great; get the next car whether the old one is still good or not. It seems we have more habituated to change than been shocked by it. Habituation occurs when there is no or limited response to stimuli; most people “just go along.”
Because NT offers potential futures beyond most people’s capacity for imagination, today’s futurists, 50 years on from Future Shock’s publication, talk about “inventing” or “shaping” the future rather than “adapting.” However, many futures research studies, such as the plethora of future-of-work studies that address ways to “adapt” to emergent technological unemployment scenarios⁴, prescribe “anticipation,” such as anticipation of alternative work structures and economics, and “shaping” policy and personal strategies with that anticipation in mind.
In the latter sections of Future Shock there is more stress on managing change, assessing future technologies, and having large-scale public discussions about the future. The Tofflers called for massive computer systems to inform these public discussions. Today we have Google and Wikipedia for information, but these resources do not provide coherence and context for future possibilities. In addition to these great internet resources, we need global collective intelligence systems, open to the public and continually and systematically updated and improved with inputs from both “experts” and the public.
The Tofflers complained that there was no organized way for the public to input their views on the future. Today we have the Global Futures Intelligence System⁵ which, along with other systems, can inform and be informed by the “future public assembles” that the Tofflers called for, but those assemblies are yet to be seriously implemented. SYNCONs [Alvin Toffler participated in one held at the US Congress] by the Committee for the Future, led by Barbara Marx Hubbard back in the 1970s⁶, and various state processes in the USA as documented in Anticipatory Democracy, edited by Clement Bezold, were the closest things to “social future assembles.” Toward the end of the book, the Tofflers write, “…social future assemblies could unleash powerful constructive forces—the forces of conscious evolution.” And this is the most important point of the book: we are in a position to consciously control our evolution, if we get organized to do so.
Granted, Future Shock mostly focuses on the United States. China was mentioned only twice, tangentially, in the entire book. Books on the general future do not do that today. President Putin says whoever leads AI will rule the world, and China said it will lead AI by 2030. The US, EU, and China have projects to reverse-engineer the human brain; corporations like IBM, Google, Facebook, Baidu, Microsoft, Alibaba, Apple, and Amazon are working on artificial brains and artificial general intelligence. Organized crime can buy the best computer talent money can buy. Hence, the Great Global Brain Race is on! This is the new drama replacing the nuclear arms race. Future Shock did not consider the future of geopolitics.
Meanwhile, the world is improving more than most pessimists know, but future dangers are worse than most optimists indicate. Fifty years ago, the majority of humans lived in extreme poverty, many with reduced brain function due to protein and iron malnutrition. Fifty years from today, the majority of humans could be technologically augmented geniuses with quantum computing at their command.
After 24 years of The Millennium Project’s global futures research, it is clear that we, as a species, are winning more than losing, but the areas where we are losing are very serious. We have no grounds for pessimism, but no room to relax, either.
When you consider the many wrong decisions made and good decisions missed—day after day and year after year around the world—it is amazing that we are still making as much progress as we are. But we would be well served to reread Future Shock’s final chapter, “Strategies of Social Futurism,” and implement the spirit of those suggestions, with a caveat: it would have been better to call it “Social Futures,” as “futurism” is a school of art founded in Milan, Italy, over a hundred years ago, glorifying technology and robotized style and later being related to fascism. “Social Futures” has the advantage of reinforcing that there are more than one possible future.
Jerome C. Glenn is the co-founder (1996) and CEO of The Millennium Project (on global futures research), and author of “Social Technologies of Freedom” in Anticipatory Democracy, edited by Clem Bezold and initiated in the last section of Future Shock. He has published over 100 future-oriented articles in such publications as Nikkei, ADWEEK, International Tribune, LEADERS, New York Times, McGraw-Hill’s Contemporary Learning Series, Current, Royal Society of Arts (RSA) Journal, Foresight, Futures, Technological Forecasting, Futures Research Quarterly, and The Futurist. He is co-editor of Futures Research Methodology versions 1.0 to 3.0, author of Future Mind: Merging the Mystical and the Technological in the 21st Century (1989 & 1994), Linking the Future: Findhorn, Auroville, Arcosanti (1979), and co-author of Space Trek: The Endless Migration (1978 & 1979). Glenn has a BA in philosophy from American University and an MA in Teaching Social Science—Futuristics from Antioch Graduate School of Education (now Antioch University New England), and was a doctoral candidate in general futures research at the University of Massachusetts. He received the Donella Meadows Medal, Kondratieff Medal, Emerald Citation of Excellence, honorary professorship, and doctor’s degrees from two universities in South America (Universidad Ricardo Palma and Universidad Franz Tamayo). He was the Washington, DC, representative for the United Nations University as executive director of the American Council for the UNU 1988-2007, and is a leading boomerang stunt man.
1. I refer to the Tofflers throughout this chapter because in the acknowledgments section, Alvin Toffler writes: “It [Future Shock] is, in large measure, her book, as well as mine.” Also, Al dedicated an earlier book, The Culture Consumers: Art and Affluence in America, published by St. Martin’s Press in 1964, to Heidi.
2. The first doctoral degree granted by UMass in Futures Research went to Christopher Dede, a direct decedent of Benjamin Franklin, possibly America’s first futurist.
3. Alvin Toffler was a member of the Board of Advisors of the Future Options Room, a small Washington-based think tank I led in the mid-1970s.
4. Work/Technology 2050: Scenarios and Actions, Glenn, J and The Millennium Project Team. The Millennium Project, 2019: Washington, DC.
6. Glenn, J “Participatory Methods,” ed. Glenn J., Gordon, T., Futures Research Methodology 3.0 The Millennium Project