“Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”
This quote, taken from the Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848, could have been the motto of Future Shock. 
But the Tofflers avoided political implications throughout their text, except in the last chapter, which addressed the social aspects of futurism. Given their experience of the witch hunt against intellectuals during McCarthyism after WWII, they really can’t be blamed. The last chapter however, hinted at their desire to leave both capitalism and communism behind, as soon as the “Super-Industrialization” arrived.
Alvin and Heidi Toffler were born in the 1930s. They inherited the sensibilities of family and community shaped by the Great Depression. As teenagers, they experienced and/or were exposed to disruptions spanning WWII to the Holocaust to the atomic bomb. This was followed by Sputnik, Agent Orange, napalm, and cybernetic warfare. Doomsday machines were being drawn up. Wires were put in the heads of people, Wernher von Braun—accomplice in slave labor and murder at Mittelland, Austria—developed Saturn rockets for NASA.
The development and application of technology was deeply amoral.
Counterculture emerged as a balance to the technocratic aggression against everything that was considered beautiful and human. The ’60s were psychedelic; LSD was used to breach the borders of the mind. “Tune in, turn on, drop out.” Free love was a “natural” alternative to drugs and served as an antidote against aggression. “Make love, not war.” Doug Engelbart’s networked computers were set up to augment the human mind, not replace it. The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Starship, and an attendant culture emerged in California, culminating in a joint resistance against government agency generally. The roots of today’s Silicon Valley can be traced to these times.
The cultural and technological environment for Alvin and Heidi Toffler offered colorful and wild phenomena. Indeed, Future Shock is a testament to the spirit of these times. It is a lengthy text, full of glimpses into the expected transformational development that was beginning to unfold out of this complex milieu.
Future Shock is largely concerned with mental and emotional states—and their problems—particularly those related to expectations. Serious problems would surely arise, the Tofflers posited, as everything became increasingly fluid. Take relationships, for example. Why not, they suggested, when moving for a new, better job, also replace your family with a new one, as well? Why own stuff, or bother to relate to loved ones, when everything is constantly in flux and transient?
From our vantage today, the reality 50 years later actually seems fairly well behaved, albeit certainly not prudish. Statistically, Millennials have fewer sexual affaires than did their generational counterparts at the time Future Shock was written. At the same time, the Tofflers would likely have been shocked by Nipplegate of Super Bowl XXXVIII. A partially exposed female breast would have been fined as indecent exposure. Yet we also see myriad incongruities. Peter Paul Rubens’s nude paintings, for example, are censored by Facebook’s AI algorithms 500 years after the fact. And instead of tripping on acid, nowadays LSD is taken in microdoses to enhance performance on the job.
The Tofflers were operating in a state of expectation; they communicated the coming of a technologically driven cultural transformation. Today’s futurists, like Ray Kurzweil or Nick Bostrom, seem to operate from a similar state of expectation—the expectation in all cases being driven by the observation of accelerating change, extracted out of diverse phenomena. The Tofflers’ method was to extract patterns out of these observations.
The Tofflers’ method of pattern creation as applied to futurist thinking would yield a pattern of expectationism driven by the sensation of acceleration. Surely everybody has had the experience of sitting in a car, waiting at a crossroads beside a large bus. The bus suddenly moves, and one’s bodily reflex is to counter the perceived motion. The result is an awkward movement of the body in the direction of the steering wheel, though the car hasn’t moved at all. The sensation of acceleration was a misinterpretation.
Translated in futurist thinking, it is paramount to distinguish your personal sense of acceleration from the realities of the developments occurring around you. In short, you have to develop a sense of time as an antidote to your feelings and as a guideline for contributions.
In my experience, a meaningful sense of time has to be fostered continuously in order to avoid expectationism as the effect of wrongly perceived acceleration. To this end, it is helpful to participate actively in the development of cutting-edge technologies, if for no other reason than to directly experience the complexity of inventing something new. In my case, it is about the self-driving car—a mobile robot disguised as an automobile. Self-driving cars are relying on machine learning and diverse robotic technologies, integrated with difficult-to-handle amounts of data from very diverse sources. For nearly every detail of the core functionality, the technological foundation has to be developed in parallel with the development of the conceptual framework.
Sebastian Thrun, one of the fathers of the self-driving car, projected 2040 as the target for fully automated driving under all conditions. His early estimation seems quite on track, as the technology is entering the phase where flawless performance is required, and every step further is smaller and more difficult to achieve. The difficulties in developing self-driving cars acting as if they were driven by an experienced driver also provide a clue regarding the principal limits of artificial intelligence.
Mimicking human understanding of the world is not enough if a machine is acting in the real world. In the case of the self-driving car, the limits of AI are visible for everybody. These limits are not a problem at all, since every technology has limits we are able to manage, but it is important to communicate the technology as it will be.
Expectationism, therefore, should be avoided.
In today’s world I would love to see an extension of good old-fashioned futurism. I say extension because it should extend futurism with solutions.
In my case, working at Daimler AG, this is relatively straightforward, as Daimler creates concept cars that are meant to serve as beacons marking the future of mobility. As a motive, we refer to this as pathways into a desirable future. The Tofflers used the term “preferable future,” which they wanted to be imagined by the integration of creative people, like artists, into the creation process. In the case of the F015 research car, that’s exactly what we did, working together with Ars Electronica, the cradle of Cyberarts.
Extended futurism should help us guard against the dominant pitfall of expectationism: anxiety—what the Tofflers called “future shock.” Anxiety about the future can best be fought with participation models, integrating different perspectives into the creation process.
Born in Berlin in 1957, Alexander Mankowsky studied sociology, philosophy, and psychology at the Free University of Berlin. He graduated in 1984 with the title of Diplom Soziologe. After four years in social services helping troubled children, he decided to follow the Zeitgeist and enrolled at a postgraduate university, focusing on the then new field of artificial intelligence. After heavy programming in OOS and Prolog, he earned the title of “Knowledge Engineer.” Since 1989, Alexander has worked in the research unit at Daimler AG, initially focusing on societal trends in mobility. This led him in 2001 to his current field of work as Futurist and Mobility Philosopher at Daimler Research. Alexander is focused on human-centered innovation utilizing futuristic technological concepts. He is embedded in Daimler’s rich and diverse creative network.